"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot hurt, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up!