Cortana should be dancing in the streets

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Qi Lu leaves, Cortana and Bing to Shum, Office and Pall’s Skype go to Jha: This morning saw a breathtaking push to put Cortana in the driver’s seat. I
[See the full post at: Cortana should be dancing in the streets]

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Cortana is definitely queen.

Innovation Keynote video; Nadella at Ignite
https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/39172

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It will be interesting to see whether these people can produce anything of real usefulness to the world outside their sand castle.

They just seem creepy to me.

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Cortana and the Master Chief will destroy the Covenant! Cortana is hot but I think Alexa is better.

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Have to agree with you there. Intelligence is very seductive.

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Interesting! Let’s wait and see what good can come out of this restructuring.

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chuckle, i can see where you are coming from there, and don’t disagree with the last part.

they are surely very capable and work hard and efficiently, but i question their ethical positions/behaviors, their overarching goals and visions for how our lives/our world should be, and what they decide to do in order to extract as much profit that they can.

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Its not just them its all digital companies. They produce nothing mostly ways to collect data and impose automated decisions on people that extract rather than provide value.

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That’s not intelligence that’s control manipulation and exploitation.

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Large bureaucracies confuse reorganizations with productive improvements bcoz they can’t do the latter.

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Another reason to give up on Wu.

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+1 🙂 on one of my devices.

In the process of ditching and switching to LXDE.

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+1

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We’re on the same page. Their hubris, their masters-of-the-universe job titles, their desperation to get control of change before it consumes them–that’s some of what is creepy.

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“We trained hard … but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

Seems to fit the bill quite nicely.

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Every so often i need a small reminder of why i decided to avoid windows 10. This is one of those small reminders. So am i reading this correctly? That cortana will be given more integration and control?

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Not yet sure. But the snooping on Home and Pro systems won’t decrease. I keep hoping we’ll get more control over it, but so far, nothing.

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This is how Cortana works.
It listens to you, but can potentially listen to everything in the background and collects whatever information it can for its complex algorithm.
Siri does it too.

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So does Alexa, and the Google voice system.

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What does Cortana do when you don’t have a microphone or camera on your system, like my Win 10 Pro. system I’m on now?

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Oh I agree, it’s not just MS, or confined to technology companies, it’s many companies/organizations/individuals.

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@wdburt1,

absolutely.

=====
although, taken on its own, the last quality of theirs in that list of three is understandable, and probably is a requirement of most creatures and groups on earth, if they want to stay alive.
i wouldn’t fault them for being afraid of coming changes that look like they might eliminate their very existence,
but their predictions of the future, their desires for the future, their calculations of what they can get away with in the future — might not be as accurate as they think, and might not be (aren’t) for the common good, nor perhaps even for their own good.
(thus circling right back to the first and second qualities of theirs, in that list of three!)

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I know that but you should have a CHOICE whether to use these things or not. I reject all voice recognition systems because i do not trust them to not always be listening (as the samsung smart tvs were found to be doing) not to mention what they do with that data to increase ad revenue. But the problem is microsoft appear to be baking cortana so thoroughly into the OS that you can’t turn it off. You could once turn it off but now you can’t so easily? Is that correct?

I’ve seen a vision of the future and it’s one where everything can be controlled by a spoken command and/or gesture but that requires that you’re always on camera and always in earshot of a microphone.

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So does Santa (Claus)

I remember having discussions with my cousins about whether Santa could see us all the time or just in the weeks before Christmas, and if he could read all our thoughts, or just hear what we said aloud. Thus, we often whispered when we were playing at Grandma’s house, just in case that would help our Christmas-gift chances.

…Good training for our surveillance-infused daily life in the 21st century.

(Minus the presents once a year.)

—-
How could anyone think that it’s a benign technology to let companies install devices that are constantly listening and recording everything that happens in the environment — even in people’s own homes — and then collating all that in some “cloud” to be probably hacked, and to be stored for the ages?

No, no, it’s not for me.

If I want to order a new bathrobe online or play some songs or turn up my thermostat, I can do it manually, I don’t need to sit on the couch and yell across the room to some nefarious machine that is connected to some ridiculous internet of things which is eventually going to play a part in our downfall.

—-
I still think of Cortana as being a good name for an awkward, boxy, mid-1970s car, offered in either bright orange or avocado green, looking something like a Pinto.

To imagine Cortana dancing in the streets, I picture it doing the Soul Train group dance, where everyone formed two lines and some extraverted people boogied down the center.

🙂

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You can always type.

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Step back and look at this with a little historical perspective. In the late Fifties and early Sixties there was a wave of concern that “automation” would eliminate jobs, along with predictions that it would leave the human race with nothing to do. It was an old idea, actually, one that underlay the Progressive movement of fifty years before, when it appeared to some that capitalism had solved the problem of production and could be harnessed to support redistribution of the wealth.

In the 1960s debate, some economists responded that human wants are infinite, and that people invent new “needs” as soon as the old ones are met. They suggested that people would spend their growing leisure time traveling, educating themselves, etc. Note the shift from “real” to notional needs.

These economists seemed to have won the argument for a long time, as employment and population continued to grow. Another huge factor is that government and other institutions began to take a larger share of the gains, dissipating them according to their own priorities, including war and the creation of massive entitlements. The rapidly rising cost of a college education is but one example.

Lately we have seen a resurgence of the concern that technology will leave us with no work, except for a very few who invent technology–who will in the end themselves be replaced by artificial intelligence. And, as in the Sixties, there is a renewed attempt to promote invented, notional “needs” as if they were real ones. The value of “connectedness,” for instance, which is so often assumed to be nearly absolute, is actually a mix of positives, negatives, and sheer fluff–way overrated.

Overall, of course, digital technology has made possible huge advances in productivity and welfare. Whether Microsoft can continue to surf that wave without coming up with something that has the true usefulness of, say, Windows 3.1, is however very much in doubt.

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M$FT is rumored to be developing a companion for Cortana codeamed called “Knecht Ruprecht”.

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Wikipedia says

“…The Ford Cortina is a car which was built by Ford of Britain in various guises from 1962 to 1982, and was the United Kingdom’s best-selling car of the 1970s.”

Taunus in Germany.

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M$

re: wdburt1

“…. Their hubris, their masters-of-the-universe job titles…”

Twitter

Dave CoplinVerified account
@dcoplin

Author of Futures, Technology Alchemist, Human Revolutionary and Inventor of Pretentious Job Titles. Oh, and Chief Envisioning Officer for Microsoft UK.

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HA!

My job title is still just “Hack.”

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Interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht

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It sucks your soul right out through your eyeballs. Cortana always has a backup plan. All hail cortana.

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Wonder how many users understand that, and to what extent Microsoft’s business model depends on that ignorance?

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I’ve burst out laughing suddenly and am being stared at. 🙂

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Just wait for the 2018 version codenamed “Krampus”:

“…in Austria, the Knecht Ruprecht character functions as St. Nicholas’ assistant, rather than as the primary actor in the early December rituals; keeping a watchful eye on the benevolent saint during his journey.

Both are, in turn, accompanied in these regions by an assortment of terrifying horned, goat-like creatures known as the “Krampus”, who seek out and terrorize misbehaving children identified by St. Nicholas for punishment.

Austrian children grow up believing the worst offenders are whipped with birch switches, and sometimes stuffed in a burlap sack and thrown into an icy river for their bad deeds!”

[from the Wikipedia link Woody cited above]

——
Antique greeting card featuring the Krampus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gruss_vom_Krampus.jpg

Other scary images — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus

Phew, that horned goat imagery is pretty darn powerful in an archetypical way, no matter what one’s upbringing and beliefs.

——–
The North American late 20th Century version of Santa is a select blend of new and old attributes, sanitized and commercialized, like a lot of folklore/myths/fairy tales have been.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus

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Sometimes I wish Woody’s Cafe were a real bricks-and-mortar one, where we could all meet for a cup of coffee / glass of wine once a month and shoot the breeze.
🙂

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That would be nice. Only that those of us who post here often are not physically in the same location or even close. This would involve using something like Skype to emulate a feeling of meeting in person and this would come with all the snooping threats associated with that type of technology 😀

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Oops. Glad i made you laugh but apologies for any increased social anxiety from being stared at. Believe me, i know how it feels. 🙂

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@ch100,

You may not be aware that you have interpreted what I said in too “literal” a manner. (I was deliberately being fanciful, whilst sincere in my sentiments.)

And then you have suggested two reasons why what you imagined I was talking about (but which was not what I was talking about) would not work. (I know that people here live in locations around the world. Plus, I don’t do Skype-type video chatting.)
🙂

…However, as to the potential plan of everyone meeting for afternoon tea at Claridge’s for LizzyTish’s 81st birthday next year…!
😉

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hmm, when I looked up your name in Startpage/Ixquick “images” yesterday, I came across a few other self-descriptions that you’ve used!

i couldn’t open (due to my PeerBlock settings) or i didn’t follow the links, but they were to your profiles on google-plus, linked-in, twitter, and other internet magazines (in the same vein as InfoWorld) where you have, or have had, a profile. i remember grinning at a couple of the descriptors, but don’t remember now what they were.

also, your name, and seemingly your identity (i.e., it does not appear to be another person who happens to share your name), has 2 profiles on linked-in – i just thought i’d tell you if you weren’t aware. one of them the site allowed me to click on (without being logged-in there) and the other one the site told me i’d have to log in before i could see.

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I’ve tested several id’s with LinkedIn – thus likely the confusion.

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