Incredibly OT: Dumb Machines

Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" is one of my favorite books of all time.

That is all.

A lot of this can be answered by "because it's cool."

and humans will become so dumb and helpless that they'll fail to realize that their fridge is trying to kill them by refusing to communicate that toxic mold has started growing in the month-old loaf of bread.

It's all a matter of convenience. It's an attempt to make life easier for people.

Now, that said, it's just freaking cool.

That Humanity has a way of building increasingly complext ideologies, technologies and other systems. Humans have always adapted by saying , "Whatevah" and just learning to cope with it or, in extreme cases like Nazi-ism, saying " Aw hell nah" and putting an end to it.  Then again, we have not encountered the self-aware kitchen appliance, so obvious caveats apply.

How about, instead of refrigerators that tell me when my milk is going bad, they design some flying cars like we were supposed to have by now.

I look forward to the day when computers can track and analyze comments their owners make on sports blogs after disappointing losses, and can deliver incapacitating electric shocks when a certain level of whiny assholism is reached.

The ultimate advance will occur when MGoBlog mods themselves can deliver those shocks—lethal, if warranted—directly to the offending idiots.

You ever see the Disney movie WALL-E where the humans are out in space on their giant cruise ship per se and they're all too fat to even get out of a chair because they've had machines and robots do everything for them? This is the first step in that direction.

I can imagine a time when you have a smart fridge that automatically scans every item in the fridge and creates an automatic inventory.  Then, if you're on your way home from work and want to check if you need to pick up milk or hot sauce or whatever, you can automically pull up a list, neatly sorted, of the contents, sorted by item, expiration date, even level remaining.  Complete information to base your decisions off of. 

Perhaps it even notices what you buy often and are running low on and runs a report to check local stores for pricing, availability, and sales to steer you to the best deals.  Or it notices that you have all the ingrediants for a great recipe but x and y and suggests you pick those up to make chicken cordon bleu tonight, or whatever.  Or it could track your preferences and suggest alternative products you might be interested in: I know you always buy x brand bratwurst, you might want to try them with y brand mustard. 

Would these revolutionize the way you live?  Likely not, but they could be helpful and quite nice in some circumstances.  It may be cost prohibitive at the moment but with electronic pricing dropping daily, there could be a time where consumers are willing to spend an extra hundred dollars or whatever to have these conveniences.  Or they won't and the fridges won't sell, and the market has decided fridge R&D has to look elsewhere for the next great innovation.

sign on a cooler that states "not a toilet".  

So, I wonder how large the market is for hyperlinked refrigerators away from places like Silicon Valley, Ann Arbor. Boston, Seattle, etc. . .

"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

-Carl Sagan

 Ugh, Just what I need. Another one. I already have an expiration date sensing device,… called my wife. She not only won’t touch anything minutely past a “best by” date, but I hate waking up to the phase, “You have to run out for milk for your coffee. It expired today and I threw it out!” Arrgh!

While some of this seems scary and either Big Brother or Terminator, there are efficiencies to be gained through these types of applications

As and example, I just set this up in my house:

Problem: if you have a constant hot water recirculation system, the hot water heater has to cycle more often to keep the water heated with heat loss in the loop. A less efficient tank water heater is required. Thus wasting either gas or electricity.

Flip Problem: if you disable the recirculation system (like I did when I installed a tankless water heater) when I turn on the hot water, I let many many gallons of cold water run down the drain waiting for the hot thus wasting resource.

Solution: set up an on-demand recirculation loop.

I have X10 motion sensors in each of the "far away" bathrooms that turn on the recirculation system when you walk into the bathroom and a heat sensor at the pump. So the recirc pump pulls the water through the loop until the heat sensor detects hot water and shuts the pump down. This takes a few minutes, and you still have to wait a bit, but you are not wasting water, and the water heater doesn't run all day. Metlund makes a retrofit push button version of this as well, but I went with X10 as I had an existing pump.

Next step for me though is working in the Android app so I can turn on the recirc as I head up the stairs. If my alarm clock could do this as well - that would be great.

Smart machines can be more efficient. Imagine an outlet that can tell when your devices are fully charged or not in use, and shuts off so the plugged in DC power converters are not just turning amps into heat.

To me, scanning a milk carton with my smartphone in order to get a reminder when it goes bad takes way more effort than just reading the label and remembering it.

I'm sure it would be just used as a particular way to market me foods that I like or need.

My only hope for science/technology is that, in my lifetime, something is invented to take care of all of my chores and everyday activities so I don't have to do sh-t.  No more shaving, vacuuming, laundry, cooking, taking out trash, etc, etc.  I guess a robot could fix that but I imagine a robot maid/butler/cook will be very expensive.

We're actually piloting a program called "SmartHome" in conjunction with the AMI meters that we're currently installing (those of you in Ann Arbor should already have these meters). The idea is essentially to have information on energy usage from appliances, heating and A/C and other items transmitted to your computer so you can monitor your own consumption and even shop for different available rates to optimize your bill. Eventually, the idea is to be able to allow things in your house to nominally be on or off at different times of the day depending on when our on-peak or off-peak rates are in effect, all customizable by the customer.

coincidentally, I read these stories earlier today on Car & Driver's website, I thought both were rather nifty.

http://blog.caranddriver.com/audi-demonstrates-driverless-self-parking-a7-in-vegas-parking-garage/

Audi is working on technology to allow a car to valet park itself.

http://blog.caranddriver.com/we-go-for-a-ride-in-audis-piloted-driving-autonomous-a6-avant-prototype-2013-ces/

Audi is also working on a system that will automatically drive your car for you in dense traffic conditions (i.e. rush hour < 40 mph) allowing you to do other stuff, like video conferencing or reading.

I suspect it is not a very good idea for humanity in general to have machines that do conveniences instead of only difficult tasks.  If you don't exercise regularly you will likely become fat.  It's not a reach to also say that if you don't exercise your memory and problem-solving skills regularly you will likely become stupid.  Worse yet, you will start expecting other people (and things) to do your work and thinking for you.  That used to be called "a spoiled little brat."

Anyone who doesn't believe me needs only to look at the next post (anywhere on the Internet) that looks like it was written by a four-year-old with all the grammar and spelling errors and is followed up by "oh haha lol stupid autocorrect."  No, I don't respect your opinion if you don't have the time to give it even ten seconds of scrutiny because you're letting your little machine do your thinking.

My objection mainly manifests itself in self-driving cars and "features" they have in them these days like blind-spot sensors and steering wheels that put you back in your lane if you drift.  Just the other day I got cut off by a guy in a Mercedes with a blind-spot sensor on the mirror, because the sensor didn't blink on.  (Theory: the sensor senses a car that is actually overlapping, but can't sense one that isn't - which creates a dangerous situation when there is a car that's overtaking and will be overlapped in another half a second.) Apparently you don't even have to check your mirrors anymore, but you can still cause an accident.  If he'd hit me and we'd stopped to exchange information I just bet the first words out of his mouth would've been "oh sorry my blind spot sensor told me there was nothing there."

This is the part where I acknowledge I sound like Herm, and that doesn't bother me one bit.  The so-called Greatest Generation didn't get that name by having everything and doing nothing for themselves.

And in other CES news, a new startup company called Skynet has a way for machines to talk to each other all over the world!

Often our predictions of the "future" end up as way off target, and technology often fails to become mainstream because it is too expensive, or the convenience that it brings is outweighed by the inconvenience of making the switch from what you were already doing. It's easier for consumers to make a lateral move to technology than to learn to do something entirely new. A personal digital grocery/sale tracker synched to local grocery stores which are synched to your Google account or tablet is far more likely to happen than a smart fridge. 

What's attractive, affordable, and easy to a consumer market will almost always take precedence over what's possible. Set aside past predictions of flying cars, and space colonies, and just look at solar technology, for example. Solar has been around for decades, now, everybody likes it, and every house should have it, but it's just slightly not convenient or attractive enough for people to actually pay for it. Many average houses could even make money selling electricity back in the long run, yet I don't have it, and neither does anyone on my street. But I bet half the houses on my block have a George Forman grill. That's about as outside the box the average American consumer gets.

I don't see why you'd have to scan milk with your smart phone, the people that sold you the milk already know when it expires. Wal-Mart buys Amazon. You maintain a grocery subscription, tweak your bi-weekly order online when you feel like it, rarely go to the store. Product demand gets even more predictable than it already is.     ...so, buy Amazon stock?

I kind of figure refrigerators will be obsolete in metropolitan areas 30 years from now.