Dissed by a Device

It's official. I am living in the future. No, I don't have my own personal helicopter. There's no cubbyhole on the kitchen wall automatically dispensing gourmet meals when it senses I am hungry. Robby the Robot isn't whipping up cunning little frocks upon request.

I used to think I would be living in the future when I could get any movie I wanted without leaving the house, and while Netflix and Amazon have come pretty close on that one, more often than not all they provide is hours of mind-blinding trolling in the vaults of trash TV.

No, it turns out the future is less like The Jetsons and more like 2001: A Space Odyssey, as in “Open the pod door, HAL.”

The future is now:  I have been sassed by Siri, The Smartphone Princess. I inadvertently used her name in requesting a web search and the little snip responded with “We were talking about you, not me!” Yes, I have been told to smarten up and move along by an electronic device.

For years I've driven cars that chime a nanny chime when the outdoor temperature dips to 37F. But that isn't personal. The stilted pronunciation of our old GPS?  That's merely funny. Siri's piqued tone? That was shocking. The fact that she couldn't see my scowl made it all the worse.

I guess I'll have to get used to it, though, since it seems we are moving into a world of so-called smart and smarter devices, although bossy and bossier might be more accurate. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Evgeny Morozov, author of the forthcoming title To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, describes a panoply of developments that move far beyond adding safety or providing information and into the realm of social engineering.

Self-driving cars might be fun in an amusement park sort of way, but how about a tattle-tale trash can? I am so old that I remember the exciting task of burning the household rubbish in a metal barrel in the back yard. I once lived in a three-family house which had a bucket set in the ground with a foot-pedal to lift the lid. You tossed in your gooey food garbage and someone else collected it for pig food. So I am more than a bit bemused by BinCam which takes a picture of your trash, sends it to Mechanical Turk to analyze, and then posts the info to your social media sites to promote recycling, presumably through peer pressure and public shaming.

I'm so last century that I believe my empties and my junk mail are my business. I don't need or want to be awarded brownie points by an algorithm; I fill up that big blue single-stream recycling can all by my grown-up self. I will live dangerously, though, by ignoring the email from Nespresso letting me know I can recycle my used espresso capsules at Sur La Table stores. I'm in deep trouble if my character is defined by how goody-two-shoes I am about paper, plastic, or used coffee. The Bin-Cam level of scrutiny and reportage sounds too much like a really nasty elementary school, at best.

I am not a neo-Luddite who thinks that the world went to hell in a handbasket when the alarm clock was invented. I enjoy the little argument settler I carry around with me and love the fact that I don't have to write down let alone memorize phone numbers. BinCam is a bit creepy, but harmless as long as it is voluntary. However, the technology exists for monitoring, hectoring, reporting and forbidding almost anything and there is a class of visionaries out there who see reality as “broken” and themselves as the ones to fix it.

I've lived long enough to have a deep-seated mistrust of others who know what is good for me and see no problem in imposing it on me. Sure, weeding out all inconvenience, risk, frail human judgments, and accidents, even happy ones, sounds benign. Who wouldn't want to live in a world without road rage or food poisoning? But I've read enough in the dystopia genre to know where that kind of thinking leads.

It might not come to the worst, of course, but if it does, I'll just wrap my head in low-tech repurposed tinfoil to keep out the evil rays, pull my invisibility cloak around me, and throw my rubbish in someone else's trash can.

For a quick dystopic tale, in which a community adopts a way of life they call The Sameness, I recommend Lois Lowry's young adult novel The Giver.

See Robby the Robot in action in the movie trailer for Forbidden Planet.