The year is 2050 and your dingy old toaster has finally given up it's last crumbs. You hop onto Amazon in hopes of finding a suitable replacement as there's no longer any box stores you can travel to. Dumb appliances have been phased out and newer internet connected appliances have taken over. It's better for the consumer they claim.
Not wanting an overtly fancy contraption you pick a no frills unit that includes a touch screen along the side. A few hours later it arrives. Setting it up was almost as easy as your old one. Plug it in, enter your wi-fi password, and a credit card to start your free pro trial of the monthly subscription service that tweets at you when the toast is done. It says you can cancel at anytime but it requires a 5 day waiting period. It also requires access to your contacts.
Tired and just wanting your toast you agree. You insert two slices of white bread and press the big red GO button on the touch screen. An electrical motor whines from inside the toaster at it begins to retract the toast into itself. There's a few seconds of silence as the toaster slowly heat ups. While awkwardly standing there you notice the touch screen flickers and begins to display a buffering icon. An ad for I Can't Believe it's Not Butter begins to play. To make matters worse you can't even ignore it by looking away due to a small tinny sounding speaker playing the company's jingle.
2 years later, Amazon discontinues updates on the toaster. No one notices, but it still toasts. 8 years later, people hack them and cause them to burn down some houses. Of course, it was the owner's fault - they were running a discontinued toaster that wasn't receiving software updates anymore.
Yeah, and the fault clearly is that, after discontinuing updates, they still supported the device in their cloud. They should have bricked the devices, removing write support ;-)
I’m not sure whether to add that smiley here. That would have been a big middle finger to their customers, but the alternative they chose turned out to be worse for many customers. Maybe, the rule should be “if a product requires a subscription, the product should be free”?
In WD’s case, it surprised me their cloud still supported a device they stopped supporting in 2015.
"We used to toast your data, now we can toast your bread!*"
* Contains forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or result expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.
Although forward-looking statements contained in this presentation are based upon what management of the Company believes are reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management’s estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
Radicalized (2019). Four novellas, including the bread one. I just happened to have read it last week; it's a solid collection of stories. Model Minority from that collection is a good story as well.
As an avid toast data-logger that would really put me over the edge. I have 9 years of daily toast data and I graph it in interesting ways a la Mr. Wolfram
Toast is licensed, not sold. You are given a perpetual non-exclusive license for use of resultant toast. Upon termination of contract, you are to return all toast in its original form to the licensing entity (whoever it is this week).
My grandmother made those in her Sunbeam toaster before loading them with room-temperature butter and Laura Scudder's smooth peanut butter. (Yes, my grandmother kept butter at room temperature but refrigerated the eggs. Go figure... grandmothers.)
> My grandmother made those in her Sunbeam toaster before loading them with room-temperature butter and Laura Scudder's smooth peanut butter. (Yes, my grandmother kept butter at room temperature but refrigerated the eggs. Go figure... grandmothers.)
American commercial eggs (and this has been true for a long time) need refrigeration because thet are washed, which reduces surface pathogens but compromises the eggs natural resistance to environmental pathogens and spoilage. Meanwhile, in most climates, butter is safe out of refrigeration. So, your grandmother was doing it right.
We buy the single brick of European butter for toast and daily use. It stays in the butter bell on the counter. We also buy sticks of unsalted butter for cooking and baking. Those live in the fridge until needed. Thaw on the counter in the morning if you need it soft when cooking.
You don't keep all the butter on the counter, just one stick in a butter dish at room temp so it's spreadable.
I assume that's what you're talking about. Keeping the butter dish in the fridge at all times would be pretty strange--butter is good for weeks at room temp, far longer than a single stick is likely to last.
City folk vs country folk? Wagering a guess, chilled butter won't squash during handling so manufacturers, transporters, and retailers keep it cold? I think it's odd to keep open sticks of butter in the fridge. Spreading cold butter is a pain. Ghee is seen in stores outside of refrigerated sections.
Butter starts to go off after a few weeks at room temp, which is plenty for a single stick in the butter dish at home but mildly inconvenient for shippers and retailers, or people who like to buy staple ingredients in bulk. It lasts for many months refrigerated, though.
One cube goes in the tray, the rest stays in the fridge. Otherwise making toast for breakfast would be impossible because you'd have to wait an eternity for the butter to soften, at which point you'd be late for work/school/etc.
Take out the butter you need beforehand to thaw. Or I’ve seen people microwave for 5 seconds. My family stopped using butter outside of occasional uses years ago though due to saturated fats.
Generally, I see people using the spreadable alternative to butter though.
A QR code is baked on the backside on it in the bakery. People with too much time (and bread) on their hands soon figure out which spots you need to darken with a clothes iron so the checksum still matches and the toaster accepts the slice.
Later, when it's discovered that the toaster occasionally catches on fire, users are encouraged to pay $9.99 per month for "Toaster Plus," which causes an alarm to play before the fire starts, so that you know to get the extinguisher.
Then they let you customize the alarm noise, so that you can choose how to be alerted of the future house fire. Soon, companies get rich selling $3 "toaster fire ringtones."
Eventually, even after fire-less toasters are "invented," people prefer the old, "still catching on fire" ones, since "toasters have always worked that way."
This was also after a massive recall due to an incident with a high end Peloton toaster and a small child. All of the $9,000 FedBucks™ units were recalled and the "Just Toast" feature removed
"A watched pot never boils, but watched toast finishes faster." Black box testing has found that the toaster's heating coils are throttled when eye tracking doesn't find anybody watching the ad.
All the while I couldn't help but want to share how good pan-fried/toasted bread is. It's the butter of course, just generously butter up a pan, spread the bread so it soaks up the butter. Takes a little longer, but you also get to feel like a cook.
Stovetops haven't been a thing in most homes in over a decade. Everyone either heats up frozen meals or "cooks" separated ingredients in a special MealWave oven. True chefs are underrated for some reason that I still don't fully understand.
Luckily the world is burning, so many people just cook on the sidewalks. The smart cooks learned that the solar panels get pretty damn hot, so they've been hijacking the roofs. Electricity prices now vary with meal timings (as well as everything else).
Second this. Another nice technique if you have a toaster oven (or presumably any oven) is to toast the bread a bit first, then pull it out and butter it, then put it back in. Way better toast.
I use to be so enthusiastic about technology. Now I almost dread the next innovation for how it will inevitably find it’s major use case in advertising. I swear I’m turning Luddite.
What solidified this in me was when Microsoft announced Trusted Computing, some 15 years ago[0]. I was scarred with the fact that technology enables so much abuse and that the companies will spin it until it sounds like a plus for the customer. And later, it basically became the Zeitgeist. We kind of returned to remotely managed thin clients, instead of Computing really being Personal.
That's only the first iteration. Next, they'll only load individual packed proprietary toast-pods. Budget third-party pods will work, until the manufacturer rolls out a silent firmware update to brick your toaster, on the grounds of violating the EULA
This is perhaps the existential crisis that engineering in all its forms has to deal with. Much of the Western ethos and certainly engineering culture in general is about making life better. Instead, our only task now is making it more profitable.
Samsung fridges have machine vision systems to catalog their contents, then combine the data with data from samsung smart TVs. That way, they can be joined against your tv watching habits. This is all to better target ads.
If you disable it, then it breaks the demand response function on the fridge, indirectly killing polar bears and other living things.
They cost as much (or more) than non-connected versions.
”There is no planned release date for Bixby Vision for refrigerators, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. It’s more of a concept than a feature today”
“Did you ever think the day would come when you could talk to your refrigerator, and it would actually listen? With Bixby on Family Hub, you can ask to see the contents of your fridge or even start playing music without lifting a finger.”
So, the camera is there. Whether it has machine learning to detect contents and connects that with you tv, I wouldn’t know.
The picture in the article is so laughable. 6 plates each with one perfect item, left uncovered for the camera. My fridge is absolutely crammed with items, almost all of which are in a Tupperware or plastic bag, or shoved into the crisper drawer. Leftovers, chopped veg, etc. But it's okay that this is a hard CV challenge … there is no useful feature to be created here anyways.
WiFi password? Even by 2035ish it’d come with integrated mobile data so the user won’t have to worry about ensuring it has consistent network access to the mothership.
Of course! It'll come preconfigured with your Amazon account, so it'll automatically integrate with other Amazon Home appliances that you have.
Except the bread bin your mother gifted you for Christmas is a Google device, and the two do not work together. As such your toaster is always adding a reminder to buy bread onto your Amazon Fresh grocery list. Your fridge is constantly reminding you about this, whenever you are more than 2m away, and it is in "suggested products" mode.
Compared to the adverts you saw before - often for processed junk food even though you are trying really hard to be on a diet - you actually find the bread adverts a relief and less distracting.
So I noticed this week that my Canon printer was able to connect to my "secure" Wi-Fi during its initial setup without at any point prompting for a password. How worried should I be? Did it steal the keys from my computer?
That... sounds really really odd. Are you sure you (or someone else in your household) didn’t put in the key at some point? How did you notice that it connected? Which model number? What kind of WiFi security?
I'm sure, because I took it out of the box and did the first time setup. WiFi is standard WPA2. Printer is a Canon Pixma TR4527.
Here's the process, for those interested. And I did work hard to see if there's any other way.
1. You download the printer "install software" from Canon's website.
2. Run the installer. It makes you read a long legal agreement, including that you won't use the printer for any antisocial purposes.
3. And then asks for your permission to install monitoring software to collect data from your printer. Probably including whatever confidential documents you print? Apparently in China all this stuff gets sent automatically to a "research firm".
Oh yeah, and if you don't agree, it installs the software anyway but they say they won't use it.
4. The printer initially acts as its own WiFi access point. Your PC disconnects from its router and connects to the printer. What if your neighbour has the same printer? Who knows. Maybe you'd connect to that too.
5. The PC then connects back to the router's WiFi network... And the printer does 's too. Somehow. Never gave it the WiFi password. But I'm guessing it just asked my PC very politely.
Nah, it's just a bit cheaper until non-ad supported toaster makers go out of business, and then you both pay, and watch ads. Like with cable television.
Ever read Ubik? I think the only thing missing is that it should charge your for each piece of toast you make and remit the payment to either the manufacturer or your landlord. If you are behind on rent, you can’t make toast.
Ubik was one of my favs. He has to put in a coin to get out the door
of his apartment in the morning, right? 5th Element stole that with the cigarette dispenser.
Cool. It reminds me of one of the characters from Shooting Fish (1997) who has a penchant for "psychoanalyzing" mid-century electric appliances so he can repair them. And, Brazil with needless complexity everywhere.
The Oculus VR goggles (who has a TV anymore?) serving you Facebook ads also has attention sensors (hey it's already on your head, so it was easy to add that 5 cent brain-wave sensor!), and if your brain ever thinks "Hey, that looks interesting", they'd just tell the poor Deliveroo "contractor" to drop off the device at your house, for a "Free 7 day trial. Throw it in trash if you're not interested!".
Late to comment, but couldn't resist the comparison with Ubik. The door that refuses to open until the protagonist deposits a coin, and threatens him when he begins to bypass it, could well be the AI toaster that berates you for not using approved bread.
Why can’t you just crumple some wires and make a toaster yourself?
(Because outlets require certified chips with power-certificate-chain validation on both sides of a power cord, if you ever get your hands on such an old-fashioned hardware.)
By 2050, the out of control inflation has made bread too expensive for everyone except the top 1%. Toasters sold to normal folks scan barcodes on bread slices to check if the bakery is part of their bread insurance network. After playing the 5 minute ad, your toaster happily announces that your bakery is no longer covered, and asks if you want to make a $350 co-pay, with "Sign Up" and "More Details" buttons.
Not to worry, we'll be in WW3 by then, as states try to respond to mass upheavals caused by our failure to stop catastrophic climate change. Toast will not be a primary concern.
And then you have to get to know the quirks of your particular toaster to know in which direction you need to adjust by two shades to get what you actually want.
Not wanting an overtly fancy contraption you pick a no frills unit that includes a touch screen along the side. A few hours later it arrives. Setting it up was almost as easy as your old one. Plug it in, enter your wi-fi password, and a credit card to start your free pro trial of the monthly subscription service that tweets at you when the toast is done. It says you can cancel at anytime but it requires a 5 day waiting period. It also requires access to your contacts.
Tired and just wanting your toast you agree. You insert two slices of white bread and press the big red GO button on the touch screen. An electrical motor whines from inside the toaster at it begins to retract the toast into itself. There's a few seconds of silence as the toaster slowly heat ups. While awkwardly standing there you notice the touch screen flickers and begins to display a buffering icon. An ad for I Can't Believe it's Not Butter begins to play. To make matters worse you can't even ignore it by looking away due to a small tinny sounding speaker playing the company's jingle.
This is your new morning routine.
Welcome to the future.