My toothbrush isn’t talking to me today.
Well, it is, I suppose, in a blinky LED sort of way. Its blinking effectively tells me “I refuse to work until you replace my head” and now nothing I do or say will persuade it otherwise. “Talk to the handle,” it’s saying. “I gave you plenty of notice to affix a new brush head.”
That’s what happens when you ignore warnings from a smart toothbrush. Like a possessive sexual partner it goes into a sulk unless you give it head every six hours (of continuous brushing).
Why did I buy a smart toothbrush in the first place? Me, who routinely pans products whose names are prefixed ‘smart’? Ah, that’s an easy question to answer: it seemed like a good idea at the time. But of course that’s just a way of deflecting blame into the third person. It’s an idiom for avoiding having to admit: “Because I didn’t think through the consequences”.
The history of human endeavour is strewn with tales of those who fail to think things through properly. Icarus forgetting that wax softens in strong sunlight. A kid on TikTok guzzling fizzy cola before swallowing three extra-strong mints to see what happens. A rock star hiring a full orchestra to accompany him on stage and then proceeds to perform a song that he hadn’t got around to telling the orchestra about.
A smart toothbrush is an electric toothbrush that – and here’s the smart bit – triggers an timer when it’s in use so that it can remind you to change the head at roughly three-month intervals, calculated as an accumulation of a few minutes of brushing twice a day.
Now if I had thought it through, it would certainly have occurred to me that in buying this item I would be accelerating, in my own small way, the destruction of the Earth and all life on it. And not just because of its programmed obsolescence. As this bloke found when trying to reverse his own smart toothbrush, a bit more than a countdown clock and LED are involved. The disposable brush head incorporates an antenna and an integrated circuit – an NFC tag – which stores data and can communicate wirelessly with the handle.
Security conscious readers will be pleased to read that the handle and head use a password when connecting to each other; they may be less pleased to know that this is sent over plain text. Disappointingly for sci-fi authors, there is no chance of reprogramming the two parts of the toothbrush to do anything spooky or violent. It’s also a shame for undercover journalists and whistleblowers that you won’t be able to smuggle much data on its 180-byte capacity; not even if you scrawl “Property of Lady Gaga” on it with a Sharpie.
Still, that’s quite a bit of wasteful electronics and technical effort being put into ‘smartifying’ what amounts to writing a reminder in your kitchen calendar to buy a new toothbrush head in three months’ time. So don’t throw away that Sharpie just yet.
Thinking things through like this is easy when you know what the finishing line looks like. It’s not so simple if consequences could potentially go in a million different directions, creating endless multiverse variations.
For example, did Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg have an accurate idea of how their inventions would turn out? Did they anticipate the massive social upheaval? The bullying, the suicides, the live-streamed massacres? Clever dicks with the benefit of hindsight certainly say they did, although oddly enough they didn’t think to mention it at the time. Rather, I imagine Jack and Mark thought things through only so far as the next funding round. I reckon they stumbled upon the longer-term consequences in real time, just as the rest of us did/are.
By contrast, it may well be the case that Elon Musk has thought it through, all the way to the end, and knows precisely what’s going to transpire with social media, the runaway train of the information superhighway. That’s why nothing he does makes sense: only someone who has foreseen a very different future would act in such a nonsensical manner.
Here’s a hint. Don’t listen to what Musk says; watch what he does. His actions are a beacon of frankness and honesty in an industry of bullshit. He withdrew Twitter from the EU Disinformation Code, for example. Well, of course he did. What’s the point of being part of a voluntary code that neither you nor your competitors adhere to? I suspect Musk knows exactly where social media is heading, and it is a place where there are no codes or rules or restrictions or fact-checks or protections or fairness or safety. Where we’re going, smiley-heart-hug emojis won’t be required.
But Twitter’s haemorrhaging money at the moment, isn’t it? Yes, that’s what they used to say about Facebook about 10 years ago. Trust me, Musk has worked it out and knows something that we do not.
One truth that is a constant and requires no insight is that being talked about is more important than what it is that people are saying about you. This has always been the case, not least in the tech industries.
One of my favourite retro-tech news stories is the enduring tale from 1932 of an electronics scientist who narrowly escaped being assassinated by the mechanical man he had built. The fact that the details of the event change with each telling and that not only the name of the people and places involved but even the year in which it took place are inconsistent across reports do rather lead me to the conclusion that it’s bollocks.
More likely, the inventor was trying to drum up interest ahead of an exhibition of his clunky robot by feeding an exciting, if silly, story to the newspapers. In doing so, he fed on the post-Wall-Street-crash era’s terror of rampant automation sending the jobless numbers even higher. As long as people were talking about his invention, it didn’t matter if the talk was negative: what mattered was that he could sell his useless clunky tin-can man to the first wealthy idiot with an open cheque book before they get a chance to look inside. Beyond that, who cares?
And so it is with the various forms of AI right now. It doesn’t matter that we’re all scared of Chat GPT and so on, just as long as we keep talking about them.
There is no shortage of theorists making dystopian guesses as to where AI will lead us. The one fact I feel confident about is that the people who are actually developing these AIs are not wasting their precious braintime thinking things through to their conclusion.
Or at least they don’t stop to think until they’ve already left the project – whereupon they mutter “hang on a sec…?!”, spend all night on the shitter and all of the next day wailing to news outlets that we have to put a stop to it as soon as possible.
Well, too late, pal. Join the rest of us humes walking the plank to our doom, prodded forward by jeering AIs poking metaphorical cutlasses into our virtual arses. You should have thought it through. We did – even though a fat lot of good it did us.
Oh, and that rock star who performed an encore without using the orchestra that was sitting behind him? Here you go…
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He was going to make fun of an app called Don’t Forget that uses smart technology to remind you not to leave your pets or children on the backseat when you walk away from your vehicle. But whenever he mentioned it to people, they insisted it was an excellent idea and quoted real-life examples where this could have saved lives. Assuming these forgetful types remembered to run the app, of course. Maybe get their toothbrushes to remind them too. See? I’m thinking it through.
“Don’t forget” app .... my now Mother in law did indeed leave her first baby in the pram outside a shop while she was there and went home. She thought to herself “I’ve forgotten something.....” My car now reminds me to remember to take my mobile phone out of the car. The number of times I wonder where it is, and of course it’s still in the car!
Ah, smart devices. They won't go away, I've noticed all the hipster coffee makers now require pairing to an app just to use the scales. Pairing a device over bluetooth just to get coffee before you've had coffee might just be the stupidest thing I've ever heard