• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov’s “Three rules of robotics”.

I wrote in my previous post that there is a much more sinister aspect to “Keyless Killers“.

Infiniti, the automobile manufacturer, is showing how their cars have the convenience of remote starting using Amazon’s voice device, the Echo aka “Alexa”.  You can see how this works in the following video:

Infiniti has a step by step guide to set up their cars to use the Echo’s Alexa command to start their cars just by saying, “Alexa start my Infiniti QX-50”.  You can read the guide HERE.

Why is this “sinister“?

How about this murder mystery scenario?  A jilted ex-lover of our beautiful actress in the video sneaks up to her house, as she slumbers peacefully, and talks through the window saying, “Alexa start my Infinity QX-50“.  The car parked in her garage dutifully starts, filling her house with carbon monoxide, and beautiful actress never sees the sun rise ever again.  When the constabulary arrives to investigate, they find the car running and assume she must have been the one in five billion who left her car running, accidentally.  No signs of foul play.  No fingerprints.  No incriminating DNA.  Cause of death, accidental.  Case closed.  Jilted ex-lover thinks to himself, “Excellent!”.

Interestingly, as I previewed this post and played the video, my Echo heard the command “Alexa…” by the actress and lit up showing that it was listening for what it should do.  Kind of spooky.

Ain’t technology grand?