» Amazon Echo

In theory this is what everyone wants, right? The equivalent of the computer from the Enterprise in your house giving you the 411 and gettin’ crap done for you.

Except the computer on the Enterprise didn’t have a creepy business model behind it. As Jon Mitchell says:

That’s right! Now you don’t even have to tell Amazon — the world’s most desperate selling-things company — what you want to buy. Just buy a $200 listening device, and Amazon will record all your wants, needs, and other conversations and send them to a “brain” in “the cloud!”

Somehow the video betrays the fact that Amazon’s whole point with this thing isn’t to give you a convenience, it’s to scrape all the rich, creamy data you’ll provide them. It doesn’t touch a single heartstring or appeal to a burning desire. “Just get it and put it in your house.” Yeah, no, I don’t think so.