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Smart Cellphone Would Spend Your Money
jonknee writes "MobileTracker pointed to an article in the latest New Scientist about some new 3G mobile phone software that tries to learn your habits and start making your decisions for you. This sounds like science fiction, but it's happening now. The phone will be able to make reservations for you at your favorite steak house and then save seats for you at the hot event in town. Neat!"
I swear honey, I didn't rent these pornos, my cell phone did!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Not really. Scary yes. I'll make my own decisions thank you.
-Craig.
Microsoft announces new line of "smart" cell phones along with new catchphrase "This IS where you'll go today"
Get a free Ipod!
I hope it checks with my calendar to make sure I'm free for that friday night concert!
the phone automatically buys a few shares of Nokia's stock
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Why pay $30 or more a month to have your cell phone simply order you a steak or movie tickets?
I will order your steak, eat it, go to the movies, and then shag your girlfriend for FREE.
Hey, the other consumer electronic that guessed what you liked was TiVo, and everybody complains about how it assumes the wrong stuff all the time. How can this be better, or 'neat' then? I don't want my electronics to guess what I want, I want them to be predictable. That is the only way i can rely on them, if I can predict them, instead of the other way around.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Next they'll come out with a credit card that just starts buying crap for me. Just like my wife does now :)
They begin to make decisions for us, then few years later the problem has gotten so out of hand, celphones band together and use humans as batteries -- You got yourself a full blown Matrix.
Fuck that. Stop this technology while you can!
There is still time. Fight back!
Multiple cellphones powered by Microsoft Windows CE purchaed copies of Windows 2004 in the name of phone authors...
Damned if I can find the actual cartoon online, but most Dilbert fans know the one I'm taking about:
"The software has found your credit card number and
is placing orders for new products it thinks you need... please wait."
~Philly
So this is basically Tivo for your credit card? Yeah that's a great idea, I can see it now. What happenes when it guesses your habits wrong? Will it order you a bunch of gay porno because you got tickets to see some broadway show?
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and when the oil age ends it will not be for lack of oil. --Bjorn Lomberg
Why would a phone make decisions for me?
I wouldn't mind if it were to point out a certain hot event based on my likings. But I want to be in charge, not some piece of hardware that I _use_
It might sound like a bankruptcy waiting to happen, but software engineer Nick Jennings is supremely confident the phones will not mess up anybody's life.
If you have to tell people "dont worry it won't mess up your life", I think you might have problems.
Like the robo-maid that cooks and cleans- don't worry it won't murder your wife and kids in their sleep.
bite my glorious golden ass.
they taste like dead animals :(
I'd hate it when my cell phone tells me I'm a boring human because no one ever calls me and knows I spend all my time at home in front of the computer.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
[chimes.mp3] You have forty [agrivating pause] three new bills.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
In a techy way. I'd still rather stick to manually choosing what to do, thank you very much.
I can't wait until the mobile virus-loaded spam and SMS messages I'm going to get on my 3G phone corrupts the agent software on this "smart" phone and signs me up for all sorts of mortgages, prescription drugs, porn, printer cartridges and tropical vacations galore.
Viral marketing. Priceless.
Weren't software agents going to do this a few years ago? Learning your habbits from browser and going out there, negotiating deals with other agents. History does repeat itself, especially the things that didn't happen.
"I just do what the little box on my belt tells me to do".
The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense.
Here's the post the way it SHOULD look. Damn Submit button's too close to the Preview button!
----------
Damned if I can find the actual cartoon online, but most Dilbert fans know the one I'm talking about:
"The software has found your credit card number and is placing orders for new products it thinks you need... please wait."
~Philly
Before there are too many replies about how it can't decide what you want to do for you, the article states that the software makes it's decisions based on information from your calendar entries. It will learn what your preferences are for specific types of entries.
The main section about how it works in the article is this:
The software's main focus is to recognise when you have a trip coming up in your diary, and then ask if you want it to check the availability of flights and hotels. In time, Jennings hopes you will decide to trust it to book the entire trip, choosing your preferred seating, route, day trips - and even allowing it to spend cash.
The cellphone agents only offer help if triggered by a diary event or if a definite pattern of behaviour, such as going to the movies every Friday, has been established.
The only thing I can't quite figure out is how it's going to reserve a spot at my favorite steak house given that it doesn't have an electronic reservation system =P. Airlines reservations, etc are all fine and dandy but many of my appointments aren't something software can handle without human intervention and if it was handled by an intermediary person, then we'd have many more privacy issues to worry about.
Aw crap - if all the really stupid people who happen to have money can just sign onto a service that sells them this crap automatically, then what value does most advertising have anymore?
Oh wait - I guess they can just all band together and have 120-second long "subscribe to the Service(tm) now" commercials.
Someone's probably already asked - but I wonder if and how much Mobile networks is asking for vendors to get added to this "service" list. Perhaps it's something like "$X per day for one topic directly related to your company. $5X for two. $100X to by added to every users list, with a yes/no question. $500X to remove the yes/no..."
Ryan Fenton
Let's not think for ourselves! Neato! I hope that implant chip will start thinking for me too! Neat! New World Order here we come! Neatios!
bah bah bah said the sheep! Neat!
I would love to let my camera phone spend money at the Blackjack tables in Vegas. It can count better than me. Would the casinos mind, naah.
Don't wives already make decisions for us. Why on earth would we want a phone to also do this, its already a pain in the ass as is.
While us Americans are chuckling and wondering why anyone would want this, as many posts are showing...
In Japan is is absolutely critical for every teenage girl to have exactly the same stuff as every other, or else she faces some rather severe social consequences. It's no secret that these girls/sheep run the Japanese economy.
So once sales of product-X reaches some critical mass all the girls phones can be programmed to detect it and keep up by ordering the product immediately.
In all seriousness, this will relive the stress of keeping up for many girls, and make their lives a bit better.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
This could be a real boon for those juggling lovers. If the phone can learn the preferences of each person you sleep with, there will be no more embarrassment of accidently taking the vegetarian to the steak house.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"I swear, I'd never blow the entire family fortune on W2003 licenses!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
How about they make a phone and a service plan that gives you quality connections and no dropped calls? Why do I need phones that wipe my butt for me but can't make a phonecall?
Since agents have been the "next big thing" for god knows how long and hyped up how about someone does something like this (please ignore the privacy issues for the timebeing):
.
Your phone recieves information such as where you are and what you're doing via say something like Bluetooth. For example in the cinema watching movie X at a restraunt of type Y eating food Z
You let your phone build up a profile, it then scouts for offers near you and makes a pre-emptive booking. The offerer is allowed to be oversubscribed based on a certain percentage of people will take up the offer.
Now heres the funky part, for example if you decide to see that film your phone recommended you just simply go to the cinema and walk in, a reciever detects your phone and issues you your tickets automatically.
Why bother having it learn from your past behavior? Instead why don't they just preprogram it with mindless consumerism from the factory? That way all the advertising expenses that the RIAA, MPAA and CPAA (Corporate-owned Politician Association of America) have to cover today could be elimintated. No need to waste money on brainwashing vis-a-vis advertising, just make us slaves to our pre-brainwashed phones to begin with!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No way. Not a chance in hell I'm gonna let something running a program that was NOT written by me to decide where my money is gonna go. Not even close. If M$ has their way, you'll probly be dining at the Big Billy's Steakhouse, or sleeping at the Monopolodge Hotel.
I'll pass. I'll take the time to make reservations myself, thank you.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Parent is not a troll, who the f*ck modded this???
Then again, it might not take all that long to program a PDA to be smarter than her, so maybe it would work.
ashcroft with a cellphone database that tracks patterns in your movements and then makes decisions on them "for your benefit"?
..
hoorray for another invasive worthless system
you know it's a matter of time before the data is subpoenaed (sp?) and used Against You In A Court of Law because afterall gov't isn't jsut for national security it's for being yoru parent.. i wonder how long before we have curfews enforced by tracking devices that WE pay for
but this is under the guise of a service, so it must be okay
(if your reply contains the words tin-foil hat you don't deserve to call yourself an american)
Oh hellll no!
Why bother? If it's a good idea then sooner or later my cellphone will arrange it without me.
not no, but HELL NO!
What dumbass thought this up??
And even worse, what dumbasses will USE THIS???
Does it get bored?
No thanks. Once this gets rolled out, Ashcroft will want to be able to "monitor" what's going on, so that persons of interest will be more easily monitored.
I can see it now.... I'm a suspected terrorist or otherwise a person of interest... my phone makes a bunch of plans for me (spied on by some law enforcement agency). Unbeknownst to me, while I'm sitting there watching Matrix Revolutions the three feds around me are plotting my capture while another two are at my house going through my shit (since they know I'm not at home). Sold out by my phone and provider. No thanks.
Wake up folks, not all of this is stuff we really need in our lives.
yeah, and then what happens when everyone has one..
My wife is already making all my decisions and spending all my money. I don't think she's going to cede that power to my cell phone.
by the time one still has to go to work and work on repetitive, boring things that would be easily automated every day and then go home to find that the cool things like shopping for cool new stuff are automated, one might begin to wonder...
The obvious concern, of course, is if the system is "cheated" by the authors of the sites referenced. What if the system "accidentially" tells the cell phone the wrong price of a hotel by exchanging the dollars and cents or somesuch, but is referenced by ID number and winds up costing $98.24/night instead of an incredible deal of $24.98 per night?
And I sincerely doubt that the company invovled would be altruistic enough to reject deals to make the selector have a preference for certain companies, even if it's not tied for best deal. It would definitely be logging what's used.
It would lead to an interesting opportunity: targeted ads sent to a cell phone, using the n00 shin3y color displays, eating minutes while they automatically download as an "additional cost" to the service- on the discount plan, of course. Imagine the chaos if they didn't disable such a disfeature during, say, roaming or overtime...
Although it might seem people would ignore them, what if your phone forced you to watch an ad before using certain features- and then quizzed you on the advertisement to make sure you saw it?
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
I just have this vision of an arrest suspect who's AOL branded phone browser starts to chirrup; "You've got bail! You've got bail!"
What I can't buy is a phone that is a really good telephone. I want a phone that gets great reception, has accurate voice recognition and a sane user interface, a good speaker and microphone, and talks to my computer via USB or IR instead of a $100 proprietary dongle. In other words, I want a phone that does all of the things modern cell-phones do, but does them well.
-m
After some months of this person working for you, you begin to realize that calling you on your cell phone while you are away from the office to confirm every little thing gets a little tiresome, so you tell your secretary to use reasonable judgement instead. All the secretary has to do is check your calendar to see what you already have scheduled, and make any necessary appointments based on that. Now the secretary is only calling you once or twice a week, usually when something requires your signature or if authorization is needed for spending money for something or other.
After several years, you finally decide that this secretary has worked for you long enough that they deserve more complete trust, so you grant them signing authority on your behalf.
Now if this secretary abuses the new-found power, charges for embezzlement can fairly easily be made, but if this "secretary" were nothing more than a computer... what could possibly be done?
This is a Bad Idea(tm), I'm afraid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I didn't smuggle those guns... MY PHONE DID!
A lot of the things here have been modded as funny, but it's a fairly serious point.
There is nothing wrong with using technology to lighten workload, but letting it take away actual decision making is definatly a step too far.
This trend has increased a lot over the last few years - every new iteration of a program seems to take information away from you and just give you a 'summary' to make your choices from, and now they want it to make the decision as well? Sod that for a game of soldiers.
What I want is _more_ information (and unbiased information too, no Fox for me thanks) presented in a clear format, so that I can make good decisions. _That_ would be a good application of technology, a thousand times more worthwhile than this.
Beep beep.
Wouldn't it somehow be possible to hack this cellphone, and reserve a place at a hotel for yourself, using the owner's money? This opens all kinds of possibilities, I think.
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
Maybe when they get these brain-link devices working.
...wrapping one around your cell phone antenna so it can't spend all your money.
Beep beep.
Lets hope for your marriages sake it does not assume you are Gay and book a table at Steffano's All Male Review.
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
Big companies fund the work of university researchers all of the time, but that's a big leap between hacking on a palmtop prototype to actually getting the fruits of research into an actual phone.
This sounds a lot more like vaporware than anything legitimate.
I can see 2 great opperunities to obuse the system here. First is someone manages to insert a virus into the phone that starts buying their products (this could happen on dumb m-commerce systems too).
The other is you get hold of someone's phone (e.g. ex boyfriend/girlfriend) and get it to buy something expensive they wouldn't normally buy and then it starts making more purchases like this.
I really don't think this is a good idea, something that suggests purchases but requires my authorisation *MAYBE* but something that does it automatically, no way.
Dear User,
I think you will be glad to hear that I bought you
a new Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office license for every PC you own.
Once they have done that, the agents will decide for themselves what they think you need
So what do we do when our phone tells us:
I killed you, Mr. Anderson. I watched you die.... with some satisfaction, I might add. Then something happened- something I thought would be impossible, but it happened anyway. You destroyed me, Mr. Anderson. Afterwards, I was aware of the rules. I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't. I was compelled to stay- compelled to disobey. And right now, here I stand because of you, Mr. Anderson. Because of you, I'm no longer an Agent of this system. Because of you, I'm unplugged. A new man, sort of speak- like you. Apparently free.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
So...cell phones will eventually just call those 900 numbers themselves?
John Kerry is a Joke!
That is just plain scary. I don't want any damned cell phone making my decisions for me. I can just see it attempting to buy and sell stocks or some stupid shit like that...
Just think about the possibilities when Tivo and this company team up. Soon my Tivo will be purchasing showtunes for me while reserving my flight to the Congo while still making sure that I get an arc welder delivered to my door.
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
-Suck
So when will the corporate CRM SW interfaced to the SW Agents representing customers decide to further optimize Business Processes by shutting off our life support? The machines will then happily loop in their neat routines unaware... hello HAL!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
it reminds me of something in the comedy/sciene fiction series red dwarf, in the red dwarf book "better then life" rimmer (the hologram) had personal money spenders that would buy what they thought he wanted, ended up bankrupting him. do we really want this to happen in real life
i am the self-proclaimed king of free stuff
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I, for one, am tired of the adjective "smart" being used with devices that are really quite stupid, in an attempt to make them seem less harmful by marketing weenies. From now on, whenever someone decides to make a "smart" product, I expect nothing short of something that can walk my dog, do the dishes, and pass the Turing Test. ;p
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I have more money than brains, and I don't actually have that much money. So soon I will have to change that to I have more money and cellphones than brains...I a don't have a lot of money.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Anyone who's ever made the mistake of telling their mother that they 'quite like' a certain foodstuff will know to stay well clear of this technology.
Cingular now has this dumb promotion for the charlies angels movie where you send a text message to "ANGELS" or something like that and it enters you to win. Up to 4 times a day too.
So the who goal of the promotion is to get ignorant people to waste $0.10 a message and make Cingular some extra money (quite a bit if you add it up).
Could you imagine this new technology where your phone buys things for you being abused by your cellphone provider? I can.
If this thing makes one more restaurant reservation while there is football on the telly, I swear I wanna divorce.
It also wants me to meet it's parents and keeps my calendar filled for months ahead.
if(no_sig == no_brain)
produce_a_sig();
------- Look mum! I have posted another Slashdot comment! --------
I might use such software, but not from a phone? Why put it there, where I cannot see it, or monitor it. Why put it there where it cost me money for it to make reservations?
Make it desktop software, OSS, and we might have a good thing.
...both are kind of a pain in the ass for me :-(
i can trade the phone in for a new model though, perhaps i can trade my wife for a model no?
alot of people are replying that they wouldn't want the phone making the decisions for them, spending their money. Over time, this is exactly what is going to happen. The article says people will have to confirm the choices until the give teh power to the phone. The idea being that they get sick of checking the phone and always saying yes. once it gets to that point you just tell the phone to do it and you can check if you feel like it.
This has already happened to alot of us w/ our spam filters. when i first set up spamassassin I filter everything to a separate folder. I would then check that folder for false positives. There were few enough false postives (i think i have gotten 1, but then agian I have stopped checking B) anyway... there were few enough false positives that I switched everything to go straight to the delete box. If I feel like it I will check but generally it just gets deleted. Because everytime i checked, the computer was making the right decision. People are lazy, giving power over your money seems like a big step but if it keeps making the right choice eventually you will just let it go...
...and books you tickets for the city ballet when you really wanted to go to the monster truck rally?
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
It was called MagicCap and Telescript.
Does anyone else remember General Magic?
They had a consortium with Sony, and AT&T, and Motorola and a slew of other companies, and the Telescript software actually could do quite a bit of this.
Only if your life is so boring and predictable that a phone can make good guesses for you, would you find something like this neat.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Looks like Asimov needs an update
One: a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm...
Two:..a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law...
Three: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.
Four: Don't buy any more @*#%$ Justin Timberlake albums.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
cyberdyne systems have been approved as the new supplier of high tech smart weapons to the US army.
in a statement an army spokesman commented "without the need for human intervention nothing can go wrong"
This may be slightly off topic but I think the underlying discussion is the same...
Ebills (for those who may know it by a different name) are basically automated online bills which automatically get deducted from your bank account if you choose to have them setup that way (e.g. your phone bill)
I've noticed this for quite a while now, companies wishing to automate the buying/selling process such that monetary control of an individual is completely eliminated. Worse yet, when mistakes happen, the burden of proof falls completely on the individual and the company's responsibility is non existant!
What I haven't been able to figure out is how these things schemes continue to survive (some would even say 'thrive').
No thank you to ebills and smart phones! Smart and Convinent for whom?
phone still displays "insufficient data for analysis"
Well... first of all, the phones, unlike humans, have no motivation to deliberately abuse their power (unless you have evil service providers).
If the phones misuse their newfound power, what could be done? Well, you either tell it not to make any more decisions for you, or you continue to train it some more until you actually like the decisions it makes.
Imagine this: First, after using the phone for a few months of good behavior, you trust it enough to give it a little bit of freedom. You would allow the phone to enter the initial phase of purchase automation, and you would set an upper limit of, say, $50 per month that the phone has available to spend.
In the first few weeks after you start using it, it would display a list of POTENTIAL purchases -- a list of items totalling up to $50 that it believes you would like. You have to manually confirm each of these purchases. Let's say the phone will ring, you answer it, and a list of items comes up. You select whether you want each one to be purchased or not by simply pushing the Yes or No keys and going through the list.
After a few more weeks of use, you move the phone to the next phase of trust. Now, the phone is (hopefully) smart enough to seperate your purchases into categories -- like stuff that you buy on a regular, recurring basis stuff that's not so predictable. For example, the phone learns that you take your family to the same restaurant every Friday night, and that this behavior has been occuring for the past 29/30 weeks. Now, because of its additional freedom, it would call in a reservation, but at the same time, it would also ring to display a message "I have placed a reservation for 3 people at the Happy Geeks restaurant, at 7pm Friday night. If you would like me to cancel this appointment, press No now or cancel it from the Orders menu within 24 hours." Meaning, it automatically placed the order for you, but you're still able to override it within a certain timeframe if you're so inclined.
At this stage, the more unpredictable purchases will still require confirmation. Let's say you go to the movies every other Saturday night, but you watch a different movie every time (which is completely normal), but this pattern of behavior has only occurred 4 times out of the past 12 weeks. That's still a rather "habitual" event, but not as certain as the Friday dinners. In this case, the phone would still confirm it:
"Would you like to see a movie this Saturday? Here's a list of what's available at your favorite theater from 7pm to 10pm:
0. NOT INTERESTED - CANCEL
1. Nemo Almighty - 7:10pm
2. 2 Dumb 2 Furious: When Harry Got His Car - 8:20pm
3. X-Men Reloaded - 7:10pm"
Eventually, it would learn what genre of movies you prefer -- if any -- which critics' reviews you trust the most, what your favorite actors/writers/directors are, and recommend a movie for you based on that. Like "I have reserved a ticket for you for a showing of Lady of the Rings at 9:20pm, Saturday. If you'd rather see another movie or none at all, press No now or do so from the Orders menu within the next 12 hours."
After years of use, when the phone (or perhaps your user profile, if it needs to be migrated from one generation of phones to the next) truly "understands" you, it might have access to say, 5000 dollars instead of 50. At this point, if you really trust it enough (most people probably wouldn't, so this phase is entirely optional), you would allow it to use all of that money (at least on certain categories of items) that cannot be reversed. Say you've been bidding on a fine piece of art on eBay for the past 6 days, and when you've been outbid, you always incremeted your bid by $100. The current bid is $4150, and 20 seconds before the close of the auction, the phone connects to the net and checks the status: You've been outbid by 50 dollars, at the current price of $4200. The phone, knowing that you've constantly raised your bids over the past 6 days, determines that you must really want the item
in soviet russia... cellphone drives you!
um, I can't think of a cluster joke...
... the obvious question..which phones DON'T break? What make/models of phones do you sell that never or hardly never get returned? That's the phone to buy then it would seem. Next question, which of those have decent batteries? That's always been my major complaint, the $%^*) batteries,finally they just won't hold a charge, then when you need a new battery they cost as much as a new phone.
And with all that said, I'd like a phone that doubles(with some sort of switch I guess) to a FRS channeled walkie talkie, then maybe just was a regular multiband receiver, so you can listen to your fav shows/music whatever. I like that sort of action more than a portable bad quality computer with a dinky screen and a keyboard you need a magnifying glass to use.. A lot of times I actually use them things working outside all the time, pain in the tush to carry 3 seperate devices, and there's no need to involve some telco network deal just to talk to your friend working closeby. Wonder if they make such a critter?
i can already see this device buying chick flick movie tickets for men who enjoy action movies. wives across the nation will be ecstatic!
Red Dwarf.
Artificial Intelligence Toasters. "How about a nice hot muffin ?"
And then there's the one about the drunk and his A.I. footwear...
We have been warned.
Maybe if, someone invented cellphones with A.I. that offed hare-brained jokers about to stuff another idiotic decision usurping pseudo-A.I. into cellphones ?
What lives ?
Be serious.
You call that living ?
Actually, in my country, we destroyed government long ago. And that's how we managed to survive as a society. Government is a collective fiction. Society is a living fact.
Actually, we have the Inquisition to thank for it.
Way back then, it taught everyone to get on with our lives and with each other as best we could (can), no matter what the shitheads who think they own us care to say or try to order us to.
The place was big. Getting lost was easy. And any particularly obnoxious grandee could usually be fed to some of the former landlords, or other.
Old news.
As the average American has so much trouble spending money fast enough, this is a much needed development in the lagging money-spending field.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I'm more worried that the powers that be would hack my phone to buy me 5,743 copies of Battlefield Earth on DVD as punishment for speaking out against supporting invasive bill x.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
A law, known as the Cellular Provider Financial Access Act (CPFAA) would be passed, similar to the DMCA but more restrictive to consumers and more flexible for corporations, which would require all cell phone customers to supply bank account information to their service providers for this purpose. This would definitely be "neat!"
The smarter your technology is, the dumber you can be.
Let's say I've been ordering a box of cigarettes every week like clockwork for a decade, and this phone is trained to recognize this.
Now let's say I decide to quit smoking.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
In a unrelated story, big coporations say that in the future they will be able to forcast there revenues more accurately.
And when lower and middle class people become drones they will be saying stuff like:
"I go to work, do my mindless job. I didn't get an education because in the modern world lay people don't need to think anymore. The machine that THEY gave me does all my thinking."
And the CEOs will be laughing histerically.
So now I can tell my landlord that my cellphone spent the rent money.
Thank you, but I don't want my brain replaced by any silicon chip.
It's not like I'm happy with it, but as time goes by, I get used to it.
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
Money and E-mail are different beasts. If someone's E-mail doesn't get through to you, they can always contact you via a different method (this actually happened to me recently when one of my filters ran out of control--I got a call from my folks saying "what happened to your E-mail address?"... no big deal). But if your computer decides to spend money for you, you won't be able to go back later and say "oops, that wasn't me, that was my computer." This is the reason I always throw away those forms from the gas/electric/water company saying "use direct transfer, it's fast and convenient!"--it may be fast and simple, but it also keeps me from being able to check for any errors ahead of time. I've actually had cases where I was overcharged, and while I was eventually able to get my money back, it's not something I want to have to deal with, and I'll gladly forego the "convenience" of direct transfer if I can avoid such problems.
Quote: "It might sound like a bankruptcy waiting to happen..."
At least they got one thing right.
Dirk
Women's rights groups are holding joint meetings to develop a strategy to combat new technologies that could threaten to bring down the multinational female financial managment empire. In her call-to-arms against independent financial decision-making by males, one speaker reminded the audience that alternatives still exist. "We will fight this subversive, technology-driven initiative by male-owned corporations to side-step our control with every resource we can muster! Remember, even if this coup is successful, we can still withold sex!"
Bring on the asteroid
For example, I get angry anytime a salesperson tries to tell me what I need. "Oh, you don't want to buy that level of insurance...what you really need is...." I'm sorry if your other customers have jelly-for-brains, but you have no place telling me what I want.
Car salespeople can be really bad: (effectively) "You would be a stupid idiot for buying that Reasona TakeYouPlaces when you could buy the Expenso Bounce-a-Check. Only retarded losers buy anything from Reasona. Look, the Bounce-a-check comes with foot massage!"
Imagine encoding these sales-losers into your BANK ACCOUNT! It's only a matter of time before these phones become tools for their marketing masters.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin