This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of past columns. Amazon has achieved something remarkable in the seven years since it introduced the first home speaker with its Alexa voice assistant. The company has convinced millions to put an Amazon computer (or two or 10) in their homes and has changed their habits. On Tuesday, the company showed off a $1,000 Alexa on wheels, multiple home security cameras, a thermostat that learns your temperature preferences, and a gadget for kids to play interactive games via video conference. I continue to be awed and a little exhausted by the relentless pace of new Amazon inventions.
It’s best to think of most of these new Amazon things as public experiments. Amazon is America’s silliest inventor. It’s Ron Popeil without a filter, plus Alexa. Amazon seems to be making any doodad it can dream up and seeing what people do with it. Some of the products won’t catch on — you probably didn’t buy the Alexa-powered ring — but some will. And Amazon takes cues from what people do with its devices and internet add-ons to tweak them further. We are co-inventors with Amazon.
As long as people know they are human guinea pigs for sometimes half-baked products, Amazon’s “Sure, why not?!” style is a refreshing way to make new things. It’s the opposite of Apple’s Extremely Serious approach to releasing a tiny number of highly refined products after years of tinkering in secret. The downside of Amazon’s spirit of constant invention is that there is less inclination to slow down and ask: Are we sure this is a good idea? Why? What is this for? Is this what ordinary people want? And if so, do we know how best to give it to them?
Amazon’s most significant idea on Tuesday was anxiety. The roving Alexa robot called Astro — plus the new security cameras, home monitoring, and eldercare helplines — played on people’s worst fears that something terrible might happen to our homes or the people we care about. (Dave Limp, the Amazon executive who oversees the company’s devices, told me that he has three teenagers and that one inspiration for Astro was the security camera trained on his home’s liquor cabinet.)
Fear is a powerful emotion. We will buy anything to protect what we care about. But it’s also unnerving that the vision from one of America’s great innovators involves erecting 24/7 virtual sentinels inside and outside our homes. Does that buy peace of mind or amp up our fears? What kind of world does that produce? And do more complicated doodads better protect our homes and our loved ones?
We don’t have to imagine the fallout from the ethos to invent first and see what happens. We’re already living with it. When technologists don’t imagine how people will respond to what they create, social networks sometimes empower authoritarians and encourage the most polarizing ideas. We get ride services that pitched a vision of less traffic and instead made more. We get sleep improvement technology that sometimes makes people’s sleep worse. We wind up with our digital information in so many hands that it’s dangerous.
I frequently message my colleagues with a version of this question, usually in all caps: IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? It’s something that I’ve asked about projects to deliver internet service from satellites, experiments with the technology-laden department and grocery stores, driverless cars, and deliveries by drone,e, and electric helicopters that tech inventors imagine whizzing above our neighborhoods. Just because a company can do something doesn’t mean that it should.
I don’t want to overthink to paralyze people from imagining new marvels. Amazon’s “Sure, why not?!” product approach can be invigorating, mainly concerning low-stakes things like digital book readers or children’s story-time gizmos. But we’ve seen the consequences when companies fail to carefully deliberate about whether something is worth doing or how their vision might go wrong. We should want inventors to invent. We should also want them to do so with care.
- Meet the man who can’t entirely virtual reality and always quits: My colleague Cade Metz introduces us to a musician in Montana named Wolf Heffelfinge,r who has tried virtual reality experiences for years — to play laser tag, watching movies, trying out different personas and visit Egyptian pyramids. Cade writes that Heffelfinger’sagain-off-againn love for the technology over nearly a decade shows that no one is confident about what virtual reality might become.
- My colleague Davey Alba writes that YouTube is crackings down. It’s declaring a ban on videos that express false claims that approved vaccines are dangerous or ineffective. YouTube also shut down accounts of several prominent anti-vaccine activists that researchers say have helped crowd out authoritative vaccine information.
- I am melting face emojis! It is winning people’s hearts, writes my colleague Anna P. Kambhampaty.
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Do you know what you need to do today? To look at a bunch of great sea slugs. I mean … “donut nudibranch,” who knew?! We want to hear from you. Please, tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at [email protected]. If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. You can also read past On Tech columns.
