A candy that plays music while you eat it
This is the sort of misapplication of technology that traumatised me as a kid, dammit
When I was in year 5 the kids in the class had been working cutting apricots and they bought tonnes of candy and these whistles they were blowing all the time.
How much did the whistles cost ? one cent.
True story.
I just got a WiFi stove that should be marketed as one of those bad ideas.
My requirements were
- induction burners
- air fryer
The closest I could find had all this “smart” crap, and convection oven was as close as I could get to air fryer
Good for destroying them with a baseball bat.
Now if things you could do with simple if/else algorithms are using “AI”
Rather freeze AI completely than use an AI refridgerator
I won’t buy AI stuff 🤮
I watched a video about the worst of CES. I was kind of amused that some of the winners of worst-of weren’t even new ideas
There was a candy I remember that from a long time ago, idk 2000ish? It was a lollipop you bit down on and you could hear music played through your teeth. I never tried it but it was sold where I worked
Another idea, the worst of the worst, was the smart fridge. I remember from business classes I took many years ago used that as an example of innovation. Or a “smart” microwave. You let it know what ingredients you have, for example by scanning the barcode, so it can recommend recipes or alert you when something is running low
The rendition of those ideas at the CES were so out of touch
This year, it is no longer Consumer Electronics Show… it’s now Corporate Electronics Show.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
What?
It’s a reference to the “Always has been” meme.
A consumer is just the opposite side of the same coin. Corporations exist because of customers and customers exist because of corporations.
a person who uses up a commodity; a purchaser of goods or services, a customer
Companies are always chasing stupid ideas. The AI fridge is the Twitter fridge of this decade, a stupid idea some business person was genius. We’ve always been this dumb.
What’s worse than that are the fully camera, gyroscope, and GPS equipped children’s toys that send all their data to an AI server.
Gyroscope, fine, I can understand them trying to understand how the toy is utilised.
GPS? Fuck off.
CAMERA?! What in the ever loving…
Yeah, so there are these kids toys at CES now that are always watching and always listening. Gyroscope if the toy is being picked up and moved, GPS to track where in the house it is, or where it’s going outside.
It’s loaded with voice and facial recognition that can track moods and environmental context. But obviously it doesn’t work offline. It has no on board AI, so all the data is sent to a service somewhere which will generate responses for the toy.
I wish it was just one such product being promoted at CES, but I’ve seen several videos now of multiple upstart toy tech brands selling similar AI plushies and such.
That is 100% going to record some kid changing, and knowing how these companies do ‘AI’ it’s probably going to be sent to some random person in India to process.
a candy that plays music while you eat it
What the heck. The whole paragraph is so ‘unnecessary technology’.
Why is that coffee machine showing me a picture of the Sydney Opera House instead of making coffee?
I’m astounded there hasn’t been a legal case already where some AI customer service bot hallucinated and promised a customer a million dollars or something and they’re trying to claim it. Set that precedent and companies would be dropping those AI clankers right quick.
there was a case where a consumer was promised something by an AI chatbot and the company tried to renege on it
sorry I don’t really remember any details about it, although I am pretty sure that it was ruled the company had to uphold the chatbot response. Oh I think part of their defense was that the chatbot was an external company or something
edit: found it, looks like the same story the other user referenced
there has! AI customer bot said they’d be a different price and they forced the flight company to uphold said price.
But not for eating. Don’t trust AI for food or other safety.
AI can eat and sleep instead of you
Not a hotdog
It sucks… really it sucksm
I’d be unemployed and in trouble, but sometimes I do wish a gigantic solar storm would cut off the internet for a year. Humanity needs the reset. Please stop shoving Wi-Fi into every device.
Everything having connectivity is cool, I like automating stuff, the issue is it feeding all of your information to a company to profit off of it or worse.
Things that can be wifi: my light switches and anything that might’ve had an analog timer back in the day. Anything critical? You can buy an analog sensor that will beep if it’s out of limits, like a freezer alarm.
The rest can f right off.
Light switches can also not be wifi. Hell, id personally prefer them not to
I only use hardwired Ethernet for my light switches
So regular demotica/hone automation light switches it is
Link to said device?
I was being ironic, I am not aware of any such device
Damn, I had slight hopes such a thing existed
It might but if so I’m not aware of it
X10 might work if you just need simple signaling.
I’m sure they do, but probably in the industrial control sense.
Obviously it would be a choice to have them wifi or not, opt-in, not opt-out. I wasn’t implying anything should be automatically wifi.
Have you ever seen the commercials from late 1800s where there is the word “electricity” in everything. Electrotherapy for every ill and electric solution for every type of drudgery, electrolyte drinks and whatnot. Same came with discovery of radioactivity. Radium drinks for long life and all that. AI is the modern buzzword for the modern snakeoil salesman.
Like Bluetooth and IoT before it.
I remember a story my Dad told me. His boss comes in and goes “we need a computer” (this was the 80s). He asked “why”. He couldn’t answer.
AI now is like that, except when someone asks “why”, they get fired and the boss slams it in anyway. It doesn’t make the product better or even more attractive. Dell has admitted that and is the only company to admit that. At best it’s a shite search engine that’s being forced on everyone against their will.
AI chat bots should be OPTIONAL, not forced onto people against their will. At best it’s a shitty search engine, at worse it is a slop machine.
Only practical solution I can think of for an AI chatbot is an optional voice mode where you can go to, say, a ticket machine and be all “hey, cheapest fare to Dundee” or something and it gives you it, but that can be done without fucking the environment and eating all the ram by just having better UI design.
- I wonder how many enemies Dell made with that lol
- AI chatbots work as customer side if implemented well (if chatbot does not have options, it won’t work well) and if customers don’t knee-jerk into repeating they want human without checking it’s options first (which, understandably, came from dealing with badly implemented chatbots). Their search is quite alright for polling public opinions (useful for example if you are lazy and wanna find overall popular film from some genre - it can summarise reddit, google, few review sites and spit the effects at you).
I know, I know. We are anti-AI here. But please, don’t be simply cynic. This tech has it’s uses, but is so badly used across everything that it’s hard not to be negative of it.
AI chat bots are actually a useful workaround for shitty web uis now. When you don’t know which icon is hiding the thing you want, you can just ask the AI to do it for you.
At the same time, they could easily be a crutch. Why bother designing a good, accessible website if most of the users are just going to access it via a chatbot?
Very good comparison actually.
