{"id":9825,"date":"2024-02-23T16:20:48","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T16:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9825"},"modified":"2024-02-23T16:20:48","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T16:20:48","slug":"my-quest-to-fix-a-crashing-roku-app-provides-a-warning-about-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9825","title":{"rendered":"My Quest to Fix a Crashing Roku App Provides a Warning About AI"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Two words in this statement popped out to me like a flying dinosaur in a mixed-reality headset: when possible<\/em>. When I flagged this in a subsequent call, Roku reassured me that a fix for my issue will<\/em> happen. In the worst-case scenario, if the problem won\u2019t be solved in the next OS, sufferers will be provided some incantation to have their televisions backdated to the previous operating system. (Does this mean we\u2019re back to hitting that home button five times?) And if that<\/em> doesn\u2019t work, which Roku says totally won\u2019t be the case, the company will make sure to make everyone satisfied somehow. The company was ready to satisfy me right away, offering me a new TV. I declined, since they weren\u2019t offering it to everyone whose Netflix was crashing.<\/p>\n

I think Roku is dealing in good faith. I\u2019d been happy with my Roku-powered smart TV, until I wasn\u2019t because it kept crashing. I take Roku at its word that it\u2019s working on the problem and might actually fix it. I acknowledge that updating software on a static platform like a television set is a particular challenge. And God knows how common bugs are in software.<\/p>\n

In any case, my inability to stream Netflix without resetting the TV every time I watch a movie is a pretty trivial problem. And you know what? Even if I never watched Netflix again, I\u2019d live. Now that Netflix has added advertising to its business model<\/a>, I\u2019m dreading the day when everyone on the service is exposed to endless commercials, unless we pay even more than the already out-of-control monthly fee. Beef<\/em> was great, but I\u2019d pass if every 10 minutes it was interrupted by pharma ads.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, my Roku problem is a warning. Artificial intelligence is thrusting us into an era that intertwines our lives with digital technology more than ever. If you think that our current software is complicated, just wait until everything works on neural nets! Even the people who create those are mystified about how they work. And, boy, can things go wrong with that stuff. Just this week, OpenAI suffered a few hours where its chatbots blurted out incoherent comments<\/a>, evoking the word salad of a stroke victim or the Republican front-runner. And Google had to temporarily stop its Gemini LLM from generating images of people, because of what it called \u201chistorical inconsistencies\u201d<\/a> in how it depicted the diversity of humanity. These are disturbing portents. We\u2019re now in the process of turning over much of our activities to these systems. If they fail, \u201ccommunity discussions\u201d won\u2019t save us.<\/p>\n

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