Smart everything everywhere

Reading an article about the annual Consumer Electronics Show CES which takes place every January in Las Vegas, well, online this year, I got intrigued by the number of smart items which have invaded our daily lives.

There are smart phones, smart cars, and even things such as smart dog flaps and smart toilets. No, I don’t have the need for a smart toilet, but that’s me I suppose, and I don’t have a dog, so a smart dog flap is not of much use to me either. And what is smart about a dog flap anyway? The dog? The flap? Both? So I started looking around what other smart items are out there, and I have come up with a few really absolutely useless ones.

There is for example the Quirky Egg Minder. Usually people open their fridge when they want to know how many eggs they have left. This little contraption does it for you (metaphorically) and tells you on your smart phone how many eggs you have left and when they are going bad. In-tray LED-lights tell you which one is the oldest egg and and the device sends you a push notification when you’re running low.

Or there is the Smarter iKettle (no, it wasn’t invented by Apple), which, you may have guessed it, let’s you boil water from your phone. Pretty cool idea, I admit, if you can’t be bothered passing by the kitchen to turn on your kettle and if you don’t mind boiling stale water, which possibly has been in the kettle for hours if not longer. There is one flaw though: Even the most advanced smartphone will not fill your kettle with water.

An other item is the smart toothbrush which has a built-in camera allowing you to take pictures of the inside of your mouth while brushing your teeth. I can’t see this feature of being of much use unless you are a dentist. Or, since we all haven’t been travelling much during this pandemic, are we supposed to share photos of our teeth with friends and family on Instagram and Facebook?

Top of my personal list of most useless smart items is no doubt the smart salt shaker. It comes with indispensable features such as mood lighting and a Bluetooth speaker. No doubt a must to liven up anyone’s dinner parties. And apparently it even has its own smartphone app to ‘shake, pinch or pour’ salt. It can even connect to Amazon’s Alexa, so rather than do it yourself, you can ask Alexa to pour half a teaspoon of salt. The manufacturer promotes it as a perfect conversation starter: And if it is not, then the state of mind of its owner most definitely will be.

I admit, I am an aficionado of gadgets myself, but one must wonder what went through some of the inventors’ of the above products minds. But weird inventions are nothing new. I distinctly remember visiting some of the electronics retailers in Tokyo’s Akihabara district in the spring of 1980, where already some rather unusual goods were on display, such as an electric razor with integrated radio, or a vertical record player (the first I had ever seen).

Smart items should – and most do – make our lives easier, and some of them are even fun to use. But just adding ‘smart’ to an invention doesn’t make it, well, smart, and a commercial success. But who knows, a few decades from now we may be living in houses smarter than us, using household items smarter than us and driving cars… you get the gist of it. And actually, as far as cars are concerned, we won’t be driving them, they will be driving us.

Eventually maybe every decision will be taken for us by smart devices. We will get dressed in the clothes which our wardrobe computer has chosen for us based on the day’s weather forecast, then eat a breakfast prepared by our household robot from ingredients which our smart fridge had ordered itself online on the basis of our pre-recorded list of preferences before getting into our self driving car to be driven to an office where we will spend our working day monitoring more computers and fine-tuning decisions their artificial intelligence is taking. In the evening we will attend events chosen for us by our electronic valet before returning to our temperature-controlled home.

Bliss or woe? It’s your call really. I do like my smart phone and my tablet, but I also like to make my own decisions, often based on emotions and irrational considerations. That’s what makes us human after all, and no smart whatsoever will ever be able to take that from us.