Ring still partners with Axon [1] as part of the Community Requests feature [2]. Since terminating the partnership with Flock is solely a PR play, the answer to your question will likely depend on if consumers en masse use this opportunity to educate themselves on the gravity of the “loss of control (of your data) in exchange for convenience” paradox of cloud services and advocate for additional changes to be made to the Ring platform, or if Amazon’s PR capability will find a way to improve consumer sentiment towards Ring products and services without addressing privacy and surveillance concerns.
Isn’t this position predicated on the assumption that individuals without substantial capital “own” an AI?
When someone uses an AI they do not own, they are (maybe) receiving a benefit in exchange for improving that AI and associated intellectual property / competitive advantage of the person or entity that owns the AI—-and subsequently improving the final position of the AI’s owner.
The better an AI becomes, the more valuable it becomes, and the more likely that the owner of the AI would want to either restrict access to the AI and extract additional value from users (e.g. via paid subscription model) or leverage the AI to develop new or improve existing revenue streams—-even if doing so is to the detriment of AI users. After all… a sufficiently-trained “AGI” AI could (in theory) be capable of outsmarting anyone that uses it, know more about its users than its users consciously know about themselves, and could act faster than any human.
While I share in your hope, I think it is unfortunately far more likely that AIs will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots and will evolve into some of the most financially and intellectually oppressive technology ever used by humans (willingly or not).
HEOS-capable gear from Marantz and Denon cover a lot of the applications you referenced. I decided I would never buy another Sonos product after the S2 rollout, and I now have a mix of eleven Denon and Marantz receivers driving both built-in, freestanding, and outdoor speakers of my choice all over my house.
[1]:https://www.axon.com
[2]:https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request