Time was when we heard people talk about how much smarter each generation was than the preceding one. We had no trouble agreeing with that: Waxing eloquent, proud about our children and grandchildren.
Now there is no more time to talk about the exploits of the next generation of humans. Instead, we talk about third generation and fourth generation mobile phones, tablets and much more than I know about. Things like fridges and closets that reposed inanimately in our homes have become ‘smart’ and are all set to get smarter in the foreseeable future.
While some welcome that, others worry that hacking prospects have increased. In addition, some speculate that humans display poorer memory and slower numerical and language skills when machines have all the answers. I am firmly convinced, however, that we have to be inherently smart to operate anything with the epithet ‘smart’ before it.
Imagine a slinky set of smart operators — all machines — in the house. The fridge can tell us when to buy ourselves a fresh bottle of ketchup, our toilet monitors the state of our insides, microchips in our clothes tell us what matches and what does not.
All this state-of-the-art stuff may be very appealing to a younger and more adept crowd, but for those of us of ‘indeterminate’ age, it is alarming in the extreme. Suppose our comfortable old machines break down — how will we get replacements that can be operated by us? We could suddenly find that there is nothing available in the market that is not ‘smart’.
That is when our problems will really start.
We get up in the morning, bleary-eyed with lack of sleep because our smartphone kept beeping every hour, on the hour, and we didn’t know how to turn it off. We pick up our smart, though not yet hands-free, electric toothbrush and we hear, “You stink!” We haven’t heard anything as rude since the last time we spoke to our spouse, some years before all things smart arrived in our homes, so we feel compelled to answer back immoderately. You would think that the spouse would look in to see what is going on and who we’re hiding in there, but that doesn’t happen. When we stop the tirade, we understand why: He is having his own dialogue with his smart toothbrush.
But that is still a minor problem compared to what comes next. Our elderly relative, like many of her ilk, is primarily concerned with all things alimentary — inputs and outgoings — and she awaits the decision of the smart toilet bowl to set the tone of her day. If she gets a thumbs-up, she hums happily and we can move on to something else. It she doesn’t, it is panic stations for everyone in the household and whether we are concerned or otherwise, we have no choice but to hover in the vicinity and launch into our oft-repeated ‘Don’t worry — be happy’ speech.
That done, we seek exhausted refuge in our favourite television serial, but a large, blank-faced set barks ‘This is the seventh time you’ve watched this programme — get off that couch and do something useful!’ It takes some cajoling to get it to work and some hours later, when we get to the smart fridge to rustle up a meal, imagine how stricken we are when we get a loud and insistent instruction to ‘clear up — clean up — discard — use up’ topped by a list of items we have no idea belong on the planet anymore, let alone our fridge.
The same occurs with our smart clothes and our smart shoes and all our other smart possessions. Obviously, they own us now, that entire bunch of smart alecs.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
