Of course, only a moron would seriously ask Alexa who to vote for, but then morons are the pivotal voting bloc in any Presidential election.
One would think Amazon would be a bit more careful not to show its hand like this. One would be wrong.
This is how you fix an election and then deny later that the election was “stolen”: Millions of little slants, nudges, lies, smears and bits of propaganda, none them by themselves significant enough to point to as corrupting, but collectively very powerful.
Watch Amazon say that this was just an inadvertent “mistake.” Sure it was. What are you, a conspiracy theorist? Big Tech would never be so openly biased and manipulative before an election! This was a glitch, that’s all. AI still has glitches! Be patient!
Hilariously, the best Alexa can come up with as a Harris “accomplishment” despite stating that there are so, so many is her DEI status. Perfect.
I find this perplexing, and perhaps attention should be paid. Amazon sells several versions of that attractive shirt above, but stopped making anything with a Confederate flag available in 2015. The impetus for this move was, as you might recall, Dylann Roof, a lone, racist wacko, shooting and killing nine African-Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church. Yet more than a month after approximately 1,200 Jewish civilians were murdered by Hamas in a carefully organized surprise terror attack, merchandise with the Palestinian slogan calling for Israel’s eradication, in accordance with the Hamas charter, is still selling briskly on Amazon to U.S. customers. The U.S. Congress just censured its racist, anti-Semitic “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib for endorsing the very same slogan. The American Jewish Committee regards the phrase as antisemitic. The White House finally condemned the use of the “inspirational phrase,” as Tlaib called it. Amazon claims to have a policy prohibiting “the sale of products that promote, incite, or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance” and”prohibits or promote organizations with such views, as well as listings that graphically portray violence or victims of violence.”
How do you reconcile the contradictory treatment of the Confederate flag, which is a far more ambiguous symbol with important significance in American history, and an infamous anti-Israel rallying cry?
I want to apologize in advance for the tone of this post. This issue makes me frightened, angry, frustrated and depressed. It is appropriate that I convey that, but this is not my favorite mode of expression.
Last month, Amazon blocked a Baltimore, Maryland-based Microsoft engineer named Brandon Jackson from accessing his “smart home” features. It disabled his Alexa and Echo Show, which managed his other smart devices. The justification for this intrusion was that an Amazon delivery driver thought he heard a racist remark from Jackson’s automated Eufy audio message when the driver rang the doorbell, which would have been odd indeed, since Jackson is black and he wasn’t at home at the time. The driver, good little Orwellian that he is, reported the imagined offense to Big Brother Amazon, which then exacted its revenge for Jackson’s WrongThink.
There was no racist comment. Jackson has multiple security cameras, and confirmed that fact, as did Amazon’s investigation. The Eufy doorbell had issued its programed response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” and the driver, walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message as “Bite me, you mocha-colored product of second-rate evolutionary processes!” or something similar. A completely understandable mistake on the driver’s part that resulted in Jackson’s Amazon account, his Alexa and Echo Show locking him out the next day. It took a week to undo it all.
Amazon confirmed the episode, and issued a statement promising that it was working to prevent similar incidents from happening in future. That’s nice. Everything is groovy, then!
It isn’t quite head-exploding, because the New York Times “The Ethicist” column has seen its columnist—there have been five of them, I think—promote unethical conduct all too frequently over the years. But the current ethics advice maven, Kwame Anthony Appiah, is a real ethicist, unlike the others, and I expect better of him. Because of his credentials and assumed authority, his unethical advice this week is particularly damaging. And to clarify my statement I quote one of many memorable exchanges during the testimony of Miss Mona Lisa Vitto (Marissa Tomei) in the climax of “My Cousin Vinny”:
D.A. Jim Trotter (Lane Smith): Objection, Your Honor! Can we clarify to the court whether the witness is stating opinion or fact?
Judge Chamberlain Haller (Fred Gwynne): [to Lisa] This is your opinion?
Mona Lisa Vito: It’s a fact.
The inquirer asked whether it was unethical for him to list a fake publisher on the title page of his self-published book that he created on Amazon, apparently a common practice that Amazon permits. He also asked whether it would be unethical to tell a bookstore owner who agreed to sell the book on consignment that the book was published by his made-up book company.
Amazon is figuring out how to make its Alexa voice assistant deepfake the voice of anyone, dead or alive, with just a short recording. The company demoed the feature at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, using the emotional trauma of the ongoing pandemic and grief to sell interest.
Amazon’s re:Mars focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other emerging technologies, with technical experts and industry leaders taking the stage. During the second-day keynote, Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon, showed off a feature being developed for Alexa.
After noting the large amount of lives lost during the pandemic, Prasad played a video demo, where a child asks Alexa, “Can grandma finish reading me Wizard of Oz?” Alexa responds, “Okay,” in her typical effeminate, robotic voice. But next, the voice of the child’s grandma comes out of the speaker to read L. Frank Baum’s tale.
Warning: reading this story is likely to make you feel hopeless. For this is what the hyper-racialization and resulting division of American society breeds, and it can only go in one direction from here. Hint: it will not be a direction that will lead anywhere good.
A brief summary:
In Windsor, Connecticut—I once spent a summer there!—Amazon contracted to have a warehouse built, with the promise of jobs and economic revitalization.
Over the past three months, workers building the Amazon warehouse claimed to have found nooses, or ropes that looked like nooses, or “noose-like” ropes at the construction site.
Protests have been organized by activists who have never seen the alleged nooses. Demands are being made for police to find and charge the noosemakers. The presence of the nooses, if they are nooses, is being called a “hate crime” by the local NAACP.
Local community activists have organized several demonstrations to demand that Amazon take stronger action to ensure the safety of Black construction workers. One such demonstration included members from the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and the New Black Panthers, who showed up at the construction site carrying guns. The armed activists said they were there to defend the Black workers and make them feel empowered to speak their mind.
Amazon and the other companies involved claim they have done everything they can. They have delayed construction twice, adding security (to protect workers from the nooses, apparently) and cameras at the site and putting up $100,000 in award money for anyone who can provide information about the nooses.
The police say their investigation has determined that there were only two nooses, with six others being ropes with the kind of loop often used in construction projects.
What’s the ethical reaction to this story? Angelia Mia Vargas, 24, has been charged with deadly conduct with a firearm after she accidentally shot her 5-year-old son while trying to shoot an over-enthusiastic 6-month-old boxer puppy that got loose from a neighbor and was running through her yard. Neither the dog nor the boy were seriously injured. My reflex reaction, I confess, was, “HA! That should teach this idiot something about gun safety!” and then I instantly regretted it. The child was innocent: what really would have been condign justice was if her shot hit her car’s gas tank and it blew up. Shooting herself in the foot would have been good. “She could have handled it differently,” said Bruno the puppy’s owner. Ya think? Here’s the terrifying beast that Angelia thought justified deadly force:
Should this woman have custody of a child? [Pointer: valkygrrl]
1. The rest of the story….There were a record number of Tulsa Race Massacre demonstrations on Memorial Day, as one might expect with “hate whitey” being the current fad. What was supposed to be the biggest one, in Tulsa of course, was cancelled after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear. The May 31st Remember & Rise event was also supposed to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams—boy, if only my sock drawer hadn’t been in such bad shape!– but it was called off because Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, increased their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each. Their lawyers also demanded that a reparations fund be increased from the agreed-upon $2 million to $10 million. What does this tell us about how reparations would turn out if the U.S. were ever so unhinged as to agree to them?
I did learn that the young African-American, Dick Rowland, whose arrest after a white woman accused him of rape (or something) during an encounter in an elevator was the fuse for the violence wasn’t prosecuted. He was released, left Tulsa, and never returned.
I wonder why…
2. Here I go, obsessing about group identity again...In New York, the “Career Opportunities in the Accounting Profession” program, sponsored by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants and the Moynihan Scholarship Fund, will introduce 250 “promising underrepresented high school students” to the accounting profession. The program will include virtual sessions about forensic accounting, interviewing skills, public speaking, networking, and an “accounting profession overview” featuring a panel discussion with experts in the profession. What a great idea! Nine institutions, including Ithaca College, Medgar Evers College, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John’s University, Siena College, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Oswego, the University at Buffalo, and Westchester Community College co-host the program, which is free of charge for students.
Oh—white students may not apply. The online application for the program includes options for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American students, but no option for white students. When confronted about the apparent discrimination involved, SUNY Oswego Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Scott Furlong huminahumina-ed that “SUNY Oswego participates in supporting the program and sees this as a beneficial service to the profession, but we strongly believe that all disadvantaged students would benefit from the COAP program.While we do not participate in recruiting the student participants in COAP or in the setting of policy for student membership, SUNY Oswego would prefer a more inclusive perspective regarding membership in COAP and the NYSSCPA policy…[which would] “align with SUNY Oswego’s ethos that is rooted in diversity of thought and people, equitable practices and policies, and inclusive experiences.” Furlong said that the matter “merits much future discussion for the purposes of having SUNY Oswego reassess our involvement and reconsider our sponsorship.”
Meanwhile, his institution will continue to participate in a program that discriminates against white students.
This is an essay in a “devotional” titled “A Rhythm of Prayer” by Sarah Bessey. Containing pieces by many authors, it is available on Amazon. Target sells it online for $14.87 in its “Religion + Beliefs” section and “Christian Life” subsection. It is selling well, I hear. The anti-white screed above was authored by Professor of Theology Chinequa Walker-Barnes of Mercer University.
Greenwald, who lost his own organization for insisting on fair reporting on the Hunter Biden scandal deliberately hidden from the public by the partisan media, has delivered an excellent account of what was done to Parler. This is why Ethics Alarms subscribes to his new platform, substack. He is one of that nearly extinct species, a journalist who reports the facts, wherever they may lead.
Of the attack on Parler, the surging alternative to Twitter, Greenwald writes in part,
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor…In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store….Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates….
I am so proud of you all, and Ethics Alarms, today. The quality of discussion on multiple posts and threads is outstanding, as varied, eloquent and and thoughtful as I have ever seen it. I offer my sincere thanks and appreciation to all participants.
And since I’m here, I might as well note that July 16 is Ethics Ambivalence Day, or perhaps Watch Out For Moral Luck Day. Which of these events that occured on July 16th can be confidently and uncontroversially designated in retrospect as “good”?
In 1790, Congress declared Washington, D.C. the new capital.
The new Congress chose a swampy, humid, muddy and mosquito-infested site on the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia to be the nation’s permanent capital. Brilliant!
In 1918, the Romanov family was executed.
This ended a 300-year imperial dynasty, and sent Russia down the road of Communism. But they got rid of those damn Czars!
In 1935, the world’s first parking meter was installed.
The world’s first parking meter, known as Park-O-Meter No. 1, was installed on the southeast corner of what was then First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, eventually helping municipalities to balance their budgets nation wide.
In 1951, “Catcher in the Rye” was published.
J.D. Salinger’s only full-length novel, about a confused and nihilistic teenager would be taught in high schools for half a century. Why, I will never know.
In 1995, Amazon opened for business.
No comment.
In 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project resulted in the first atom bomb successfully exploding in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Ethics Alarms 