Kettle Whistles, iPad Suggests Tea

File under: The AI says you are being paranoid, Jim.

This morning I was relaxing a bit while my partner made some nice coffee (AeroPress). Don't worry, I made the first batch for us; I'm not slacking. Then the kettle whistled in the other room, my iPad suggested out of the blue that I have not read a book in a while, and do I want to have some coffee or tea and read a book? Now it was somewhere between possible and probable that this was a coincidence, but it creeped me out nonetheless. Has stuff like this happened to you recently? LMK in the comments.

I think, and have good reason to, that despite their protestations to the contrary, Apple, along with every other company that sticks a mic on a device, would love, love, love to have that mic always be on and do active listening to "improve my life" (i.e., get me hooked and then sell me stuff that I wouldn't own). Now, I keep iOS AI features as well as Siri turned off. Even those are only supposed to listen for the your voice saying "Hey Siri" and only process it locally, and Apple folks swear to their privacy policy, but... (refer to above)...and technically, a kettle whistle is not a voice, so...

The way capitalism sets up dependency is to initially offer something nice and convenient that does something for free, then once you get used to it turn it into a rent through a process Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" (the word of the year for 2024, in case you missed it). But the rent is not obvious in the form of subscription fees or whatnot; it is in the background by making it so if you want the convenient book suggestion with your coffee (I don't), then you won't mind starting to see things (I would) that you might want to buy that you hadn't thought of, such as, for example, buying that book you are going to read. Of course, when you buy it on your iPad (duh! Who reads paper anymore?). It no longer means you own it. It is "let" to you. Unless you format shift it, which if I told you how would be something like a felony, jail time, and a huge fine. But it is ok to do it, as long as you don't tell anyone how, which of course I am not doing, as you can plainly (not) see. You are paying a fee for a revocable license otherwise, which is not quite a rent but not quite a buy either, since you bought a license to use the book rather than the book itself.

Meh, I am probably imagining it. So says the AI: I'm attributing cause to correlation and indulging in magical thinking, but as an outside-the-box historian, I wonder, why is it that I make this correlation in the first place? Because the process above has happened for decades if not centuries, way farther back than when Google retired its Don't Be Evil" slogan.

A little further probing revealed it was an app called Yumo that made the suggestion, which doesn't appear to have access to my mic. I uninstalled it for being creepy anyway. And the point is not that this particular instance was or wasn't surveillance; it is that the question comes up the way it does because it certainly could have been the case. I think it is just a version of capitalism, you know.