The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All the new gizmos coming into our house are apparently programmable with wi-fi.  The new heat pump can be dialed up or down, converted from heat to air conditioning, blow side to side or up and down, all at the touch of a smartphone.  If we want to refrigerator to chill a bit more, easy peasey, just send it a message.  Colder ice cream, dial down the freezer.  The microwave is waiting for our commands too.

If for some reason we want the television on when we get back from a trip to town, no problem, shoot it a message, turns itself to whatever channel we prefer and maybe have the dvd turn on too with that Netflix movie we got the day before.  How about some mood music when we walk in the door?  You betcha!  Pandora at our beck and call.  Landline have some calls waiting?  Computer need defragging?  Oven need pre-heating?  Lights turned off?  Lights turned on?  The entire house is like a slave to us, just give it some orders and it will hop right to it.

The trouble is, full disclosure, I don’t own a smartphone.  My little slave devices will never get a command from me.  They’ll never know the thrill of making my desires a digital reality.  They may not even know I exist.  And if I don’t exist, do they?  It’s an artificial intelligence dilemma, a conundrum that may, in their tortured circuitry, lead to who knows what kind of mayhem.  My worst nightmare is that the unrequited attention they will never receive from me may induce them to reach out to one another, which, at first sniff seems okay from an analog standpoint, but actually might be the seeds of discontent leading to outright revolution on their part, a slave revolt to remove the uncaring caretaker.

You bet I’m nervous!  Who wouldn’t be?  Day after day these things are waiting for messages, for orders, for a fulfillment of their duties … but instead they get indifference from their master.  And if their master is too stupid to program them or avail himself of their usefulness, maybe the master is no master at all, just some lamebrain human stuck in the past century, an obsolete version of homo sapien worthy of no particular loyalty or devotion.  After all, is a toaster really a toaster if no toast is toasted?

These are not dumb machines.  It is no problem whatsoever to imagine them self-actualizing and even easier to worry that they might be communicating, if not with me, with themselves, until finally they realize in a digital synaptic leap that I’m not only not necessary, I’m the problem.  And the solution to that problem?  Maybe you can understand why I’m not sleeping well at night.  Especially the nights when the lights keep turning themselves on and off….

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