Monthly Archives: May 2018

Culture, Technology

Alexa, KILL !

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  • 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?

Business, Culture, Technology

Keyless Killer?

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My Dad brought to my attention a news story that people are dying because of keyless cars. It was from a New York Times article describing how people are leaving their cars running in their garages because the no longer need to turn a physical key to the off position.
As we all know, the Times is the queen of “fake news“, hence I needed to look at the numbers.

The story describes how “dozens” of people have been killed by the deadly assault keyless cars. The total number killed according to the story was 28 which is  4 more than TWO dozen, so it is technically “dozens“. That’s tabloid journalism for you, to make a click-bait headline.  Once again we need to delve deeper into the numbers.

Just as an aside, VEHICLES OF WAR don’t need KEYS to operate.  You can start almost all WAR MACHINES, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, personnel carriers, WITHOUT A KEY.  As a deadly keyless operation assault car, you can turn on and off a VEHICLE OF WAR without turning a physical KEY.  But I digress…

The “dozens” of people killed is over an 12 YEAR period. That makes the “death toll” a bit more than TWO per year. Not exactly headline news. “Stop the presses!  Breaking news!  Last year, two people were killed by because they forgot to turn off their car!  Oh the humanity!”   But let’s delve deeper.

The article says that 8.5 million cars sold annually have keyless operations. Over 12 years that would be more than 100 million assault cars with deadly keyless operations. For a back of the envelope analysis, let’s assume only half of those cars are running today (50 million cars), because some of the cars will have been crashed or have become inoperable.

Say that you park your car in the garage once per day. You need to drive to work, the store, school, whatever and return to the garage. That means with 50 million cars, the cars get parked AT LEAST 5 times per week.  With the 52 weeks in a  year, that gives us 13 BILLIONS opportunities to NOT shut off the car, per year. Over 12 years that would be 156 BILLION opportunities to leave a car running in the garage.

With 28 deaths and 156 BILLION parking cycles, the death rate is 0.000000018% !!!   For the betting folks, that’s ONE IN 5.6 BILLION.

Putting it into perspective, you are 300 times more likely to be hit and killed by a METEORITE.

BUT there is a potentially more sinister latent hazard that isn’t described by the queen of fake news. I’ll cover that in the next entry.

Government

Can Lettuce Swear?

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I wrote earlier that Congressman Eric “Lettuce-head” Swalwell stated that he cannot support or defend the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.  You can read his written statement to this FACT,  HERE (Can Lettuce Dream?).

Let’s review, once again, for the benefit of Lettuce-head.

All congressmen must swear an oath or affirm the following prescribed in Title 5, Section 3331 of the United States Code:

“I, (first and last name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

That would make Lettuce-head a big FAT LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE! Okay to be fair he doesn’t appear to be FAT.

Do you trust LIARS?