Echo is basically Amazon’s answer to Siri, the virtual iPhone assistant. Unlike Siri, however, Echo is a stationary device, a cylinder parked in your living room or kitchen or bedroom — or perhaps all three. It answers questions, tells jokes, plays music, serves as an alarm clock, takes shopping orders and in general becomes a buffer between family members who cannot talk to one another. In a promotional video, Echo had aspects of both Mary Poppins and HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with perhaps a touch of “The Matrix.” […]
Some viewers of the video were appalled. “The dystopian world of the Echo advertisement is a near future (really, a present) in which no one knows anything, and everyone relies on a humanoid device to mediate their most intimate personal interactions — between parent and child, between husband and wife, between brother and sister,” Jonathan Sherman-Presser wrote in a popular LinkedIn post. “Implicit in this picture is that the family portrayed has accepted this as a worthwhile trade-off for the utility the Echo affords them.”
Mr. Sherman-Presser concluded that he found himself wondering: “What is Amazon’s vision of the role that technology plays in society? And what is its view of the world we live in — and would want to live in?”
The clear implication was that Amazon’s view was a bleak one, where people are reduced to creatures of consumption. But in the hundreds of comments the post got, more than a few people responded by saying: I want to live in that world right now.
secretive dreams 