Venting The world is turning too fucking "smart"!

[ArtsyDrawer]

I... don't know what to think, honestly.
This thread has been inspired by a conversation with a friend on discord and some googling. We were talking about that old tweet coming from a fridge. A Samsung fridge, if I remember it right. But you know what, a smart fridge could be pretty nifty. It could keep an inventory of your food and alert you when, say, your milk goes bad. Maybe it could order new milk from whatever store that does single item deliveries. Maybe it could order it via drone. There's a place in Russia that does pizza delivery through drones. Amazon does drone deliveries.
The gist of it is that the world is turning too smart. I started googling things that have no reason to be smart, and yet...
At first, I googled a thing that can maybe turn somewhat useful by smartness - a toaster. In this day and age you might not want your bread burned into a hockey puck. Maybe you actually do, who am I to judge how you like your toast?
And so I've discovered smart toasters exist. Several of them, in fact.
But you know what, that's still vaguely reasonable, right? As I said, you might like your toast in varying shades of... uh... bread... You might want it burned, you might want it mildly crispy, you might like it just vaguely warm, just unfreezing your bread. Still vaguely reasonable if you're stupidly rich.
But let's go stupid, let's go unreasonably stupid: socks. Socks have no reason to be "smart", do they?
No, as it turns out, smart socks are definitely a thing. But, alright, it measures your running technique... or something like that... I didn't read into this too much. I was too baffled by the sheer existence of such a device. Too baffled to read what it's for.
Now I got stuck thinking - what has absolutely no right to be smart?
It has to be something stationary, it has to be something vaguely useful, but not TOO useful. As I light up a cigarette a thought strikes me - an ashtray!
Why the fucking fuck?!
It has some kind of Skype installed. Maybe to berate you for smoking? I don't know. I don't want to know. I kind of do, honestly, but no... I don't know...
Alright... Alright... Deep breaths, Compo, deep breaths. Surely there's a thing out there that has no fucking business being smart. Just... no...
And then it hit me! A condom! Surely, no sensible, sane man would put his penis in an electronic device, and then insert this combination into a woman, right?
I mean, sure, I never had sex myself, but I imagine having sex whilst wearing some kind of electronic device on my penis, and then trying to convince a woman that it's perfectly reasonable to wear some unholy monster and insert it into her is... well... not reasonable...
Surely, no mad scientist would invent a smart condom, would they? What sort of monster would put a penis into the danger of having it attacked by some shorting circuit?!
Once more, I was wrong. Judging by the fact I was wrong, I came to the conclusion that somebody pulled this off as well!
I can't picture what sort of woman would agree to this kind of thing. If I were a woman, I certainly wouldn't. I would not be surprised to discover this was imagined by one of those raging "feminists" who scream "men are pigs" all the time on Facebook, to be quite honest with you. They would probably love to see a man in pain, on the floor, clutching his penis in pain, begging for the sweet release of death.
For the record, I do not oppose what I call "first-wave feminism" - just fighting for equal rights, none of this crap about vengeance towards men simply for being men. It's the fourth (I think) wave of feminism, the raging Karens screaming buzz words as they refuse the idea that maybe men are humans as well. I think the current buzz word for it is "radical feminism".
By the way, ladies, smart tampons exist as well. No genitals are safe from short circuits.
Obviously, you and I are not forced to wear these things, it's just that... they exist... and they exist because the market for them is large enough to make some profit from them.

So, what have I learned from these 20-ish minutes of googling smart things that have no damn reason being any level of smart?
I have no idea, honestly. Just that the world is turning too damn smart. Is it good? Is it bad?
Considering the smart condom, I'd argue it's definitely weird. The smart socks could have some kind of use, except I couldn't find any for my own life. The tampons? Well, women don't have a sort of... fullness meter that would inform them when it's time to change tampons, but I've yet to hear of a woman carrying a tampon in for varying periods of time.
OK, one last try: smart underwear. How about smart underwear? Is this not too fucking stupid?
You can control a house with them, apparently.
Fuck these scientists.
I wish I could drink, I could do a few gulps of rum right about now.

 

[Deleted member 1465]

Intelligence is the curse of humanity. It's what raised us up and what will cast us down. Meanwhile, would you like some toast?

 

[NotMeant2B]

Have you ever heard about the Internet of things? It's basically extrapolating that idea ad nauseam.
However, I dissent from your point of view, the world is not turning too smart. Smart is just a marketing label to designate everyday objects with electronics-based features which, as you could appreciate, does almost nothing in enhancing the actual funcionality of said object. Sure, having control over some things with your phone might sometimes be useful, but there are things that, as you mention, have no business in having electronics embedded into it. So, the "smart" thing is just marketing, since sophistication turns ordinary things into something attractive; but sophistication for the sake of it is just... unnecessary. The market is the one creating the problem and selling the "solution".

On the other hand, intelligent systems are a real thing, since they are based on decision making and automation which involves real science. This time, the scientists are the ones responsible for this. An intelligent system has to be autonomous, self-regulated, robust to disturbances and uncertainty, and involves complex algorithms and maths. Intances of this are the drones you mentioned before, self-driving cars, assistance robots, but there are a lot of simpler things with invisible engineering that are usually overlooked because we've got so accostumed to it.

In summary, yes, our tools have gotten more sophisticated so humans can get more specialized, which guarantee better results in accomplishing complex things... this however, has also made us less self-reliant and very dependant of such tools. We have gained abstract thinking but we are losing the simple-minded ingenuity, characteristic of earlier times. I also want to add that this abstract thinking is somehow related to depression, so that would explain some things of the modern world.

Sorry for the rambling. Those are my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Mr2005]

All this smart shit is making us more stupid.

 

[ArtsyDrawer]

@NotMeant2B the dependency on specialization that you mentioned is way too hard. I'm working in this warehouse, and when I first got in it was a sort of "everybody does everything" kind of deal. The only real specialization was our then-boss be the one dealing with customers and this one lady with a very specific printer which we constantly almost set on fire. lol
Back in the day we'd get orders of a few thousand items, which requires few thousand stickers, and since she was the only person in the company with this specific printer, we had to call like an hour in advance to send her to bring a shitload of ink and stickers for it.
Turns out this printer isn't that fancy or expensive, so we all got our own sticker printers some time after. But that one call would send this lady into panic because this thing (to her) felt so fancy and fragile she was living in fear of this daily call.
But yeah, back to everybody does everything - the then-boss would have us on a sort of rotation to keep us knowing how to do everything because if one guy gets sick, he's not too special to make the work grind to a halt. The new boss came in, basically bullied her until she left, and set up "teams". And now everything is shit. Three guys do stickers, ten apply anti theft thingies, and 15 just search and compile files. Most of the original crew left and he brought "his own crew". I stayed because there's no way I can survive another two years without the job.
On the one hand, when everybody is present? Yeah, stuff gets DONE! We easily get x5 the amount of stuff in and out. When an essential guy, like myself, the "recycling team" gets sick or has to go to a doctor meeting? Well, shit. I have 13 pallets to recycle, and since The Second Pestilence came in, I have nothing to recycle it into! But if there wasn't for covid, even then this gets stuck because
A) I'm not there, so it doesn't get recycled.
B) while it doesn't show up on the official inventory, people do try to buy shit we technically don't have, but practically do, and I'm the only one able to navigate through these pallets and fish out the missing item.
I have my own system of order, which is apparently stupid. If I'm gone, shit hits the fan. If I'm gone for a day, it's not bad, but if I'm gone for a week, say, yet another vEEG?
Oh boy.
So yeah, I agree there - having a guy or a thing specialized in that one thing, made to do one thing and do it fast? In combination with other specialized things or people? Yeah, it's good, but I still believe the "everybody does everything" approach is better.
This new boss guy doesn't, and frankly, I'm happy because of one thing, one specific guy quit, and since back in the day I compiled a notebook on how to do his job, but burned fairly recently, I don't do his job anymore.
Trust me, his job was bad. He didn't do a bad job, he was just harassed by bad people.

@Mr2005 Heh, yeah. My father speaks only Russian. We're from Kharkov. I speak English, Hebrew, and Russian. I feel so stupid some times because I have to take out my phone, open Google translate, and punch in a word to translate to Russian. Makes me feel like I've failed him in a way by not remembering that word in Russian.

 

[NotMeant2B]

@Compodulator Damn. Thanks for sharing your experiencies, I always appreciate when people tell their story. But yeah, the world has no problem with people being very specialized since there are a lot of us in the first place, there will always be someone that will be able to do what we do... which is another of the current times' problems (overpopulation, I mean). Anyway, there will always be problems, no matter the timeframe we are in, but I'd rather live in times with advanced medicine instead of getting bullets out of my body by using a hot knife or getting a lobotomy with a sharp rock (obviously I would rather not be in the first place, but you know what I mean).