I never intended to live in the future. One futuristic device after the other, step by step, pushed me to the point of arguing with inanimate objects before my morning coffee. Waking up and putting on a black all-leather ‘living inside the future’ outfit was an astonishing stretch.
A great many people term them as ‘smart’ homes and that directly conveys some degree of intellect on the part of the digital devices within the homes. But this ignores a rather large piece of the puzzle; these gadgets probably possess as much logic as a hyper five year old who snacked on too many sweets. I didn’t always plan on stepping into these high-tech waters and yet here I am, sitting in my ‘smart’ living room.
Even more shocking is how these devices reduce ‘intelligence’ to just name tags. The absence of sound judgement on these devices is convenient enough to lull you into a false sense of security.
“It will convert your existence, Uncle Horace,” she said to with her bright eyes adding. “All you do is say the word, and it happens.” Tech aficionados are typically the only ones who show this much fervor.
If this only were true.
With managing the app store on my phone first the task of setting up my smart light bulb seemed easy. There was a need to create an account and my smart bulb loved bragging about being the centerpiece of my home-care ecosystem which is why I couldn’t turn off my smart hub.
I’ve owned electric light bulbs most of my life. Always had the option to read A Tale of Two Cities especially the second volume which I love by candlelight using vintage emulating light bulbs but no, I set out to make light bulbs work for me. Why not turn them off when not needed?
My goal was singular today and fresh. I wanted to experiment:
“Turn off,” I said the day I acquired my new bulb.
And it annoyingly dimmed.
“Mission Accomplished.”
“why the hell not,” I mixed emulation light bulb with filament ones.
Every path I treaded, I did with purpose. A sense of achievement washed over me;
looks like my trusty electric allies really adore me after I banished tying myself to a light switch as well as light bulbs.
This new bliss saga at my fingers began when the so proclaimed three day honeymoon.
It was the fourth night, and my date for the evening left me feeling quite underwhelmed, as I returned home late. The dinner was with some ex-colleagues, and they invited over this chap who went on for two hours trying to sell me on the merits of cryptocurrency, and for added novelty, was misusing a salad fork.
The room was dark when I entered my house and had a horrible mood, which added to how exhausted I was feeling.
“Activate,” I stated, this time with less hope than before yet feeling cautious.
To my surprise, nothing happened.
“A device. Debug. Power-up. Activate,” I boredly slurred in my signature careful intonation that I keep in my back pocket for phrases that my English students might comprehend mistakenly.
In this case, my boyfriend broke down the automated command system tucked under the “first home basics” kit into individual sections in the order of my mother. That hollering “activate” command button was now much easier to understand.
The house continues to avoid changing directions.
“Activate,” why was I feeling like a lunatic from outer space while having some imaginary control over a room? Simply uttering those words came nowhere close to describing how I felt.
The room could now respond and I could stop feeling like an idiot when I give an order with the expectation they will listen. Why not, I forced myself to type in commands as if I were already beyond help.
For a moment, the light flickered—it illuminated a digital cloud, a metaphysical cloud suffused with uncertainty—and then went off.
“I knew I was in trouble when my light bulb informed me it needed a ‘firmware update’ on my phone.”
I wondered which civilization edict stated that a light bulb is entitled to ‘software maintenance.’ Edison’s light bulbs surely did not come with the capability to download software to function!
“Might I add, that this voice-enabled intelligent bulb was simply my gateway drug.” My initial encounter with household gadgets powered through smartphone tech marked the beginning of my dark descent in life and the constant struggle for illumination.
“So rather unexpectedly, I ended up filling my home with devices claiming to improve one’s lifestyle.” It was in fact, what I would call, remarkable life-altering forbearance. Now level-headed after having ‘venting’ sessions after arduous days. And it all started with the intelligent thermostat.
Apparently, I was idiotic enough to have decided at some point that busting the thermostat out at 3 AM while sleeping aids in constant domicile heating was scientifically viable. “It learns your patterns” they exclaimed.
Fuelled by commodities I struggled to say ‘no’ to alongside utterly simple presents, this new age violence in temperature control intelligent gadgets persuaded me to alter this disheartening quest head on, all in the name of selling convenience.
The intelligent speaker came next; a puck-like device that sits on my counter, listening and awaiting commands. It is a digital assistant’s untapped relative, albeit a converse and more intimate experience, smart speakers retain the same enormous, impossible-to-believe promise as the former.
This is where it gets tricky. While the smart speaker may be attracting a new crop of IoT consumers, it, um… doesn’t really understand the ecosystem. Or at least the ecosystem, as I assume it “plays the score” through one of its music services, is equally sponsored decked out in a vast budget.
The next one on the list was the fleekest of them all, “intelligent” with a camera that sends all sorts of “motion” alerts straight to my phone. In principle, that translates to me being bombarded with sixty notifications a day of all the dangerous events happening in front of my yard.
Evidently, the leaves have so much going on. Not to mention relentless neighborhood felines along with mid-tier squirrels. And the terrible lighting helps poor out of the may entrance picture in bell photo, in makes looking wanted.Last Tuesday, for example, I got a notification that someone was trying to break in just when I was getting ready to leave for work. It was the figure that lingers behind me.
My refrigerator has a new feature, it now boasts a display. It has a fridge on its display.
It is a fridge on which a display refers to a not-too-honest AI’s unimaginative inference based recipe suggestion logic that invariably puts me in a nihilistic juncture. Its reasoning is so baffling I question my life’s choices. A week before, it told me, in a quite robotic manner, I was “almost out” of ketchup.
My fridge now also works as a therapist, guiding me with questionable life suggestions. The last time I checked, I remember throwing the bottle away because I couldn’t recall the last time I used ketchup, during a bleak phase of college life.
It is missing milk to make my lunch type of weekdays but that would be too ADDITIVE in my fridge dipped marinated in sarcasm on the other hand, ‘so RED with sorrow.
You wouldn’t believe what took me over the edge—an intelligent vacuum. This one was a circular bot, promising to turn my cleaning around. “Set it and forget it,” said the overly cheerful manual. As it turns out, “forgetting it” meant returning home to find the robot had shredded my socks and deposited them all around the living room. My new vacuum also managed to get stuck under the couch, where it sat stuck and helpless, whining like a heartbroken lapdog.
The best part was that I returned after only a quick stroll. Oh, and made a mess everywhere I went, including a mini swimming pool of coffee situated within my kitchen. My already beige carpet was no match for my new robot vacuum. After clocking in for what can only be described as a mini modern art exhibition, it managed to paint my ‘cup o’ joe’ all over my house in the form of beige streaks infused with the scent of my coffee. Who needs modern art museums when I get a new painting with each stroll?
The company’s online troubleshooting guide failed to tackle the problem of ‘What to do when a beverage-holding robot assumes the role of an abstract expressionist sculptor.’
These devices have absolutely no control and even work on the premise that they are in opposition to me. My belief is that they are trying to plot whatever they can do to undermine me. The thermostat probably tells the lights to go full brightness when I’m trying to nap.
She gets the orders wrong on purpose and definitely has nothing to do with her recent underachievement, and the speaker whose recent underachievement does not concern her at all. And the fridge, that glorified and judgmental box of cold air, selectively and ungentlemanly makes known the fact that its door is open at the most vital points in time, thus showing no remorse.
Everything came to a head, as is often the case, a month ago while in the middle of a dinner party which I rarely host: it’s a social occasion that stems from a fit of atypical generosity. I rounded up whatever were left of my friends who had not yet succumbed to the allure of suburbia: a spell of stupendous cunning and benign cruelty, judging from the extent of its victims.
When my friends came over for dinner, I made a feeble attempt at a modern interested in science expression—right as I started getting into science writing.
Let me rephrase that. “Dim the lights to dinner mode.”
Every blue light in the house has now turned on, not dimmed, blue, and my living room looks like some underwater crime scene.
“Dinner jazz, play music, I commanded.” With Theater Mode activated, this cerulean turn had to be the plan.
The Speaker took its sweet time contemplating the request, but within seconds, blaring death metal at a volume that threatened to breach sent just above pole orbiting retarded satellites.
The moment I reached for my phone, ready to tell the devices to stop getting unruly, the vacuum decided it was the perfect moment to leave its recharge station. Plucking from the noise, the vacuum had now chosen the most spectacular moment to clean under the dining table.
Surprisingly, it made a beeline for my guests’ feet then, and in a moment, was attacking my guests with all the determined suction power it could muster.
The last thing? My doorbell began ringing the alarm for all my company. The only thing company contained was inside my house being ravaged by a robot screaming in a room with budget-aquarium acoustics while they attempted to belt what can only be classified as Scandinavian guitar riffs.
I started to close off every smart gadget I could find because the laughing from my friends was mindless enough that it demanded a reaction. I did succeed in making my friends content because at the end of the day, we had a candlelit dinner, which in fact, all of us agreed was charming and intentionally rustic.
Despite nonstop attacks on my dignity, I still to this day exclaim with boiling rage that I have yet been able to eradicate them from my life which makes my anger intensify toward the digital contraptions.
These digital direwolves remain in my castle doing everything but actually existing to advance my technological experience. Instead, they choose to sit and give me the illusion I could be safe and assist at any given moment which raises a question. Safe from what? Everything I’ve created like the nightmare that occurs without me needing every robot obedient.
I have morphed into that person who utters sentences like, “No, you have to say it exactly like this” and “It works better if you stand over here” to visitors trying to engage with what is supposed to be a smart home.
Why do I continue to give a space to these digital overlords in my home? Perhaps I am stubborn and resistant to change, like how I chose to cling on to this uncomfortable chair for years, it was an unwise purchase. Do I believe that in time, somehow, these machines will transform, become dreadful devices, and change to befitting ones?
Or could it be when everything works as expected? The lights set to dim beautifully, the temperature to my liking, and the invisible speakers play music, when all those are done, my home magically transforms into an intimate performance venue responding to me, my every demand.
Then the vacuum runs into me and my feet, the fridge benignly interrupts my train of thought with “you are out of” and a random ingredient that I’ve never touched during cooking class, and then the doorbell chimes to send me a blurry view of ‘nothing’—which is actually something, but overly labelled as ‘suspicious activity.’
I wonder if if Edison is laughing at me right now. He giggles at the updated bulb, laughing at me yelling ‘stop’ to the disc sitting on my living room instead of claiming, ‘play.’
This is the future and I don’t see flying cars nor colonies on the moon.
Lamps, like the thermostats, do not respond to adults who recite desperate words as though they are trying to initiate a conversation. We can claim with certainty that this is not the utopia we were guaranteed.
