No seriously, where are my self-calibrating Y-fronts and smart bog roll?
Internet of Useless Things, a decade later
Regular readers of this column – i.e. those of you who have have suspiciously too much time on their hands on a Friday afternoon – will be aware that I am a IT fraud.
Compooters are kinda fun and my second-favourite idea for a perfect Sunday afternoon might involve a bit of screwdriver surgery on a troublesome device. But I don't really understand the physics behind it all. My undergraduate studies were in Politics and American Studies, not electronic engineering.
Despite being something of a simpleton when it comes to grown-up tech, I have been a member of IEEE for quite a while. Among the many things IEEE is good at is identifying what members think will be The Next Big Thing and consequently organising big industry players into working groups that hammer out unversal worldwide standards for said Thing.
As well as helping me understand that Thing in a technical way, this constant push to develop standards gives me a heads-up what kinds of technology are ripe for standardisation according to real tech-heads rather than to media imposters like me.
For example, there’s a lot in IEEE publications that concerns autonomous vehicles, robotics and energy smart grids, and much less than you’d expect about artificial intelligence (AI). I guess with the latter, you can’t really put a standard mark on, let alone regulate, a misunderstood and often overhyped death sentence to creative employment.
According to this report, for example, the most likely job to be taken over by AI automation will be waitressing. This is nonsense of course. The most likely job for AI to take over completely is the job of writing reports about AI.
But roughly ten years ago, the one Thing that caught the imagination of tie-wearing engineers was the so-called Internet of Things. (I say 'so-called' because that's what it's called. So.)
Yes, we’ve been prefixing the word ‘smart’ in front of increasingly unlikely nouns for a decade or more – and that’s just in the domestic market. Smart Bikes, Smart Heating, Smart Lighting, Smart Locks, Smarting Buttocks (“A spanking! A spanking!”) and so on. Even before that we had Smart Fridges but those may well have been a figment of our collective imaginations, given that Smart Fridges were bought by… absolutely nobody you or I know.
You are much more likely to own a Smart Vacuum Cleaner. They sell them in my local Aldi but I have not bought one. According to this survey of US households, people like me are “resistant” to smart technology.
That’s a little unfair. It’s just that I’m not convinced a robo-vac will do the job properly without waking me up in the middle of the night or scaring the shit out of the cat.
I do own a Smart Speaker: apparently Alexa is hiding inside the Devialet unit under my TV set. It’s just that I have never been able to coax her into responding to my commands other than to reply that she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. So the reason I do not use that smart device function isn’t because I am resistant to it so much that the function itself is stuffed.
One of the takeaways from the report is that “Americans spend two hours per week maintaining smart home devices.” Maybe this is how they get their kicks. Me, I can find better things to do during those two hours. I’m not necessarily resistant to Smart Curtains, for example; it’s just that if I want to close the curtains… I’ll just close the fucking curtains.
By the way, you might want to check what your home and contents insurance policy says about Internet of Things devices: probably nothing. I don’t mean making a claim for a smart device that breaks down so much as what’s covered when that smart device goes postal on your other property. Does your insurance policy cover the vet’s bill if your Smart Vac tries to eat your not-so-smart pet?
I kid you not. Just recently a smart warehouse robot in a South Korean sorting facility mistook a maintenance technician for a box of vegetables – such an easy mistake, come on, we’ve all done it – and tried to pick him up with its arm and tongs, crushing him to death. Industrial site insurance might cover this kind of accident but I’m not sure whether your home insurance will fund your funeral expenses in the event that your curtain rail determines that you are a large rectangular piece of material and tries to ‘close’ you.
Ultimately, Smart Bollocks provides more ways for The Man to roger your bank account with the kind of unsavoury eagerness that would make inflating a JCB tyre with a bicycle pump in less than 30 seconds seem graceful.
Nothing represents the Internet of Things better than the Furby we bought for the kids back in the day when they were still kids. All their friends had a Furby so we had to buy one that year as well. Having cost me the best part of two ponies, the furry little bastard sat there motionless and silent doing sod all for weeks after Christmas Day until I was convinced it was broken or that the batteries must have run out. Then when I was on my own in the house at 2am watching The Exorcist on Sky Classics, it swivelled its fugly head around to me and screamed “Fuuuurrrrrrbeeeee!”
Not only did I shit myself, the Smart Kex app on my phone buzzed me a notification to inform me of the fact.
Basically, the Internet of Things industry involves selling electronic devices that you don’t need to those who don’t know any better, repaying your blind, imbecilic trust by silently biding their time waiting for you to let your guard down before grabbing you by the throat and dragging your soul to hell. Or making you lose bowel control in front of the telly.
They’re evil, I tell you. As Tristran would say: “Burn the witch!”
Forgive me for being so dismissive. I acknowledge that there may be plenty of genuinely useful smart devices out there to ease those challenging moments in your life, such as programming your lightbulbs to turn on and off to the unique sound of your farts.
What makes it so seductive is that we have come to assume that every shiny new product has Internet intelligence built into it in some way. I was nearly taken in recently by the launch of the Mug+, which “keeps coffee warm and hands comfortably tempered” thanks to its “double-walled design” and provides “an outstanding haptic experience”.
Me, I drink shitloads of coffee so the idea of a Smart Mug sounds fantastic. Put it on my Christmas list! How do you power it up?
Well, you don’t. It’s not a Smart Mug. It’s… a mug. With a plus sign after its name.
At least I’ve learnt my lesson over the years. When the whole Smart Arse market was getting started, I fooled myself into buying what I believed to be Smart Sunglasses. I’d read that a new album byfunky rappers True Ingredients was being distributed not on CD but via a pair of ludicrously outsize eye shades. I actually persuaded myself that this meant the sunglasses were some kind of audio player containing over-ear headphones.
I mean, it had to be! Even the band’s logo initials ‘TI’ were a not-so-subtle inversion of ‘IT’. So clever! I nodded knowingly as I clicked on the PayPal ‘purchase’ button.
It was only when the sunglasses turned up that I could appreciate how overly big they were. Wow, I thought, they must be simply stuffed with electronics! So I put them on, assuming they would make me the coolest. Smart Cool, as it were.
Judge for yourself:
Yes, I ordered the “Tomato Red” frames. Why wouldn’t I? If you doubt how cool I looked, compare the above to how I normally look, below:
And in the photo below, the TI shades ensure I continue looking cool as the cat leaps up to greet me first thing in the morning and lands on the front of my boxers with her claws extended.
As it turned out, the sunglasses were not an Internet Thing. Nor were they smart or even electronic in any way. They were… sunglasses.
You can just imagine the deadpan response from the person on the helpline if I’d made that support call. “There’s a promo code printed on each pair, sir. Enter the code on the website. Download the MP3s. Listen to them. Can I be of further assistance?” <click> wurrrrrrrrrrrrr…
To this day, I wonder if anyone actually went on to launch actual Smart Sunglasses that play music over the Internet. Of course, if they did, I’d be suckered into paying extra for the streaming service, and probably even more for the 5G connection. Maybe two connections: you know, so I can listen with each eye.
What next? Internet shoes? Auto-calibrating Y-fronts? Capacitive sensing toilet paper?
At least I have a damn good Internet connection at home. Most of the world doesn’t, and I include city-dwellers as well as those who choose to lurk in the boonies. Without reliable Internet access, half your Smart Stuff wouldn’t work and the rest would run at a crawl. You’d walk into a dark room and have to fart really slowly in order to fade the lights up.
Perhaps you should install an API to get the Smart Lights app to open the Smart Windows at the same time, eh?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. By having his photo published here showing him wearing TI shades, Alistair rubs shoulders with the likes of Snoop Dog. How thrilled Snoop must be to learn this. Dabbsy is on BlueSky.
"Dabbsy is on BlueSky" - what, is Substack "Notes" somehow not good enough for you? :-)
Internet, mine dropped out today 3 times and everytime the 5G modem refused to kick in and sat there sulking. I think I will cancel that part of my contract.
I did consider hunting the person messing up the fibres, but it was OK after dinner.
We have Alexa on our new IP phone handset, it finds odd things to notify us about.
I am dreading having to replace my TV, it is nicely dumb. New ones are not (and missing SCART). But a 14 year old LCD panel is getting creaky.
Sorry for waffling.