To technologists with societal awarenesses, this whole direction of Samsung is concerning.
But a personally funny thing about this particular episode, to me, is that when I left a very nice CS PhD program, to switch schools, to work on AI+HCI for software agents (before the enabling AI tech was ready)... the most common soundbite that the PI gave to prospective corporate sponsors who visited most days, was something like... "You could have a 'digital butler', who knows what you have in your fridge, and orders milk when you're running out."
(Aside: The students working on agents and wearable computing at the time were actually disproportionately ones also interested in privacy, at the university. Maybe because we were Internet-savvy from shortly before the dotcom gold rush (default Internet person sentiment was pro-privacy, pro-altruism, etc.), or maybe because we tended to be technical and thinking forward about emerging networked applications, and could guess where this was going.)
On HN, we always see a bunch of loud voices about various facets of IoT dystopia, but that doesn't reflect the broad population, yet. And as more people start to become aware, they tend to get sold diversionary snake oil solutions by influencers (e.g., "keep buying and deploying these devices, just set up a PiHole, and you'll totally be OK; like and subscribe"), while dystopian product movements march onward.
But a personally funny thing about this particular episode, to me, is that when I left a very nice CS PhD program, to switch schools, to work on AI+HCI for software agents (before the enabling AI tech was ready)... the most common soundbite that the PI gave to prospective corporate sponsors who visited most days, was something like... "You could have a 'digital butler', who knows what you have in your fridge, and orders milk when you're running out."
(Aside: The students working on agents and wearable computing at the time were actually disproportionately ones also interested in privacy, at the university. Maybe because we were Internet-savvy from shortly before the dotcom gold rush (default Internet person sentiment was pro-privacy, pro-altruism, etc.), or maybe because we tended to be technical and thinking forward about emerging networked applications, and could guess where this was going.)
On HN, we always see a bunch of loud voices about various facets of IoT dystopia, but that doesn't reflect the broad population, yet. And as more people start to become aware, they tend to get sold diversionary snake oil solutions by influencers (e.g., "keep buying and deploying these devices, just set up a PiHole, and you'll totally be OK; like and subscribe"), while dystopian product movements march onward.