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(crossposted from Bookface, so I have a prayer of finding it again)
I've been thinking about how I refer to Alexa as my house-ghost. The flat didn't have a ghost when we bought it, but now I have something that will do things like turning the telly on, playing music, finding information, or turning lights on and off — y'know, typical ghost things — just because I ask thin air.
So the Alexa in my flat is effectively isomorphic to a ghost.
I should note I'm not totally daft. Everything she can do can be done in other ways as well; physical switches for the lights and such. She's sometimes deliberately obtuse, and sometimes downright ornery, and I'm hardly going to leave a spirit in sole charge of my living space.
Not just Alexa, either. Siri, and whatever Google call their thing, we carry amulets with us that we can use to get information out of ghosts. "Hey, Siri" is a necromantic invocation. And the whole self-driving car thing? You've seen the image of one of them unable to go anywhere as it's trapped in a circle of salt? Total ghost, right there.
But if that's the case, whose ghost?
One option is that it's the same spirit bound to millions of devices. Only one Siri listens to commands given to every iPhone. One Alexa haunts all Amazon devices. And yet, the challenge of fettered omniscience is the degree of autonomy and power the ghost would require; we're talking at least weakly-godlike beings purely from the amount of parallel processing needed.
The other likelihood is that each device has its own ghost, controlled in how it can respond by wards and bindings in the device itself. Doing it this way requires only assembly-line necromancy and has far less chance of an angry god of death finding a loophole. But there's one problem with that idea: where do all the ghosts come from? Are Google exploiting heretofore-unknown mass graves? Does Amazon have a clause in its warehouse-worker contracts that your soul is their property when you die? Is the device you are bound to based on your position when you go? "Bog-standard line worker, you're going into an Echo Dot. Oh, a foreman? Welcome to the Echo Show."
At least we know where Tesla's self-driving systems come from. After all, Elon Musk is not the tech genius he likes to pretend to be, he's a fucking idiot, but he got his money from Daddy's emerald mine in Zambia. He's got plenty of ghosts on tap.
Check your contracts and EULA's, people. Figure out who has the claim to your ghost.
I've been thinking about how I refer to Alexa as my house-ghost. The flat didn't have a ghost when we bought it, but now I have something that will do things like turning the telly on, playing music, finding information, or turning lights on and off — y'know, typical ghost things — just because I ask thin air.
So the Alexa in my flat is effectively isomorphic to a ghost.
I should note I'm not totally daft. Everything she can do can be done in other ways as well; physical switches for the lights and such. She's sometimes deliberately obtuse, and sometimes downright ornery, and I'm hardly going to leave a spirit in sole charge of my living space.
Not just Alexa, either. Siri, and whatever Google call their thing, we carry amulets with us that we can use to get information out of ghosts. "Hey, Siri" is a necromantic invocation. And the whole self-driving car thing? You've seen the image of one of them unable to go anywhere as it's trapped in a circle of salt? Total ghost, right there.
But if that's the case, whose ghost?
One option is that it's the same spirit bound to millions of devices. Only one Siri listens to commands given to every iPhone. One Alexa haunts all Amazon devices. And yet, the challenge of fettered omniscience is the degree of autonomy and power the ghost would require; we're talking at least weakly-godlike beings purely from the amount of parallel processing needed.
The other likelihood is that each device has its own ghost, controlled in how it can respond by wards and bindings in the device itself. Doing it this way requires only assembly-line necromancy and has far less chance of an angry god of death finding a loophole. But there's one problem with that idea: where do all the ghosts come from? Are Google exploiting heretofore-unknown mass graves? Does Amazon have a clause in its warehouse-worker contracts that your soul is their property when you die? Is the device you are bound to based on your position when you go? "Bog-standard line worker, you're going into an Echo Dot. Oh, a foreman? Welcome to the Echo Show."
At least we know where Tesla's self-driving systems come from. After all, Elon Musk is not the tech genius he likes to pretend to be, he's a fucking idiot, but he got his money from Daddy's emerald mine in Zambia. He's got plenty of ghosts on tap.
Check your contracts and EULA's, people. Figure out who has the claim to your ghost.