uwu

i care about two (2) things in bnha

added a few more furries so i could make a whole sticker sheet

Okay, uh. So you understand where I’m coming from: I majored in software and I dabbled in some AI and technology ethics & philosophy courses in uni, and I love tech! I think AI is wildly fascinating, I think it has a ton of potential for supporting remote communities, I do not think that connected homes or AI assistants are inherently evil. But they are… vulnerable. There’s a ton of potential for good in this industry, but tech is, unfortunately, filled with people who either don’t think about the consequences of their actions, or don’t care.

Smart home devices trigger with a wake phrase, the whole “ok google/echo/whatever” thing you say to get their attention. This means that in some capacity, their microphones must always be active and ready to pick up on this wake phrase. Unfortunately, a lot of smart home manufacturers are not particularly cooperative when asked what they’re recording, how it’s attached to your identity, how they deal with potential privacy violations, etc. They might make a show of letting you log in and delete recordings your device has taken when triggered by the wake phrase, but they don’t give a flying fuck about letting you keep your secrets.

My parents grew up under a tyrannical regime and didn’t know which of their friends and classmates and family were part of the secret police and would turn them in for saying the wrong thing about the government. My mother also got one of these devices last year. I asked how she could stand it, given our people’s fairly justified paranoia, and she just smiled and joked that she isn’t overthrowing a government these days. And there’s a lot of people who agree with her, and won’t particularly care if a company is storing massive amounts of voice clips and mining them for data, because hey, they got nothing to hide, right? But these days, data mining can draw conclusions that a human mind would never dream of making, with absolutely none of the compassion. There are algorithms out there that can calculate when you are pregnant before you know it yourself, and trigger a helpful wave of baby-related advertisements, which you might find handy! until it accidentally emails it to your family members before you’re ready for that conversation (yes, an amazon echo thingy did this) or doesn’t adjust its behavior when you have a miscarriage and really do not want cheerful congratulatory ads at the 9 month mark. (This particular example was, iirc, given at a tech ethics talk about facebook, but still applicable.)

Read up on Internet of Things and other smart home products - this corner of the industry absolutely plans to make everything in your house smart one day and they have no intention of making any of their shit compatible with each other so they’re going HAM trying to sell and give away as many smart devices as they can right now in the hopes that it’ll build brand loyalty.

This is the most cursed idea and I squealed in delight when I read it because oh my god imagine it. 

Imagine their quiet, dour, goth son turning into a bright, chatterbox goth who’s loud and energetic and utterly thrives when all the attention is on him. Fuck, shit, at first I jumped on the bandwagon of the hero name Mindjack for him, but this Hitoshi would go by Siren without a fucking pause. 

In class he’s calm and polite when the teachers are doing their lessons, but around his friends (he has friends!) he never shuts up, is loud enough to drown out Bakugou when he’s being pissy, and he and Midoriya start bouncing off hero analysis ideas and are just chatting up a storm that can’t be stopped - especially if the heroes are Eraserhead and Present Mic and then nobody but the heroes in question are getting them to stop. 

In battle simulations he is a little shit that is some horrible mix between Eraserhead, Present Mic, and a dash of Ms Joke??? He always has this shit-eating grin and it was a logical ruse and every time he says that he cracks up with wild laughter and still ends up dodging whoever is attacking him and Mic is so fucking proud.

He is a chatterbox that will not shut up and he will say the stupidest and craziest things to get a response. He will bounce from language to language and start telling jokes and memes and at his worst he reveals whatever plan the person had up their sleeve and disabling it with brutal efficiency and oh, that’s got to hurt, huh? 

His favorite is, after his confidence is what it was always meant to be and he’s lived with Present Mic for at least two years, he starts to sing to throw people off because, I mean, picture it. Battle simulations in an empty city and you start hearing a slow, creepy song filtering through and bouncing off walls and echoing like something wrong. It takes exactly one Wha-? to snag them and soon enough Hitoshi always gets a response. 

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