When Your TV is Smarter Than You Are

Remember when your TV was just a TV?  You know.  When it was simply a device to watch shows that were served up to you on a schedule.  You got a little book called a TV Guide.  You looked up the shows you wanted to watch. Seinfeld is on Thursday nights at 9 pm on NBC.  Got it.  Turn on the TV. Turn the channel to NBC.  And voila.

Nothing that require an advanced degree to operate it.  The biggest advancement was when remote controls came along.  And suddenly you didn’t have to get up off the couch to change the channel.  Saving many a child from being human remote controls for their parents.

This is true of so many inanimate objects.  Suddenly, it seems, everything is “smart” these days.

It started, I think, with phones.  Our cell phones, which were a technological revelation in and of themselves when they first came out, became “smart.”  Little hand-held computers essentially capable of so much more than a mere conversation between two people.

I suppose, as with all evolutionary processes, once that “smart” barrier was broken, it was only a matter of time before it spread to all other product species.

I am simply amazed at the number of inanimate objects that have become “smart”.

In a previous blog, I wrote about smart bassinets.  No more just putting a baby down in a normal bassinet.  The smart bassinet will rock your baby with soothing motion, play white noise, detect baby’s level of soothing need, keep track on the accompanying app (because of course there’s an app, what smart device doesn’t have an app?) of how long the baby sleeps, wakes, cries.

My heating and air conditioning system is smart.  If I wake up in the middle of the night with a hot flash, and what woman over the age of 50 doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night with a hot flash, I don’t have to get out of bed and go down the stairs to adjust the thermostat.  Nope. Just open the app on my smart phone and lower the thermostat on my smart heater.

And when I get cold 5 minutes later? Because that’s the thing with hot flashes, they are flashes.  You’ll be cold 5 minutes later. Anyway, cold 5 minutes later? Smart heater app to the rescue.

We stayed in someone’s apartment whose entire place was smart.  You spoke to Alexa to turn on and off the lights, to lower or raise the blinds, to turn on and off the TV and change the channels. Now if only we could ask Alexa to cook dinner for us, that would be really smart.  Like Mensa level smart. Someone let me know when that happens. 

I also found myself talking very politely to Alexa.  I would say very nicely, “Alexa, please turn on the living room lights.”  Then when she responded and turned them on, I said, “Thank you, Alexa.”  Like Alexa is a real person.  Not a piece of technology.

Is there nothing dumb left? Besides we humans?  Which is how I feel half the time I am required to operate one of these smart devices.

My sister called me the other day to tell me about some issues she was having with her smart fireplace.  Let’s just let that sink in for a minute.  Even our fireplaces are smart now.  Really? We can’t just flip a switch, or hit a button to turn on a fireplace (forget the really old school way of real logs and starting a real fire. What do you think this is? Cave man times?). 

Well, now your fireplace has the ability to connect via Wifi and can communicate through many different devices.  Of course there’s an app for it.  How much flame you want? How much flame height? Flame speed? Flame color?

There’s a name for all this inanimate object smartness.  It’s called The Internet of Things (or IoT for short because we apparently have a propensity of shortening things to pithy acronyms).

Our products are getting smarter and smarter.  But it seems like it’s in a direct ratio of us getting dumber and dumber.  Some of us anyway.  Mainly those of us over the age of 50.  Though I certainly can’t speak for all people over the age of 50. I am sure there are some people over the age of 50 who have none of these challenges with technology. I wish I knew some of them.

I can’t wait for 30 years from now when Millenials get old and some other technological advancement will have come along and they will be asking their children what to do. I hope I live long enough to witness that. But maybe not. Because if I am struggling now with all this smart technology at age 61, goodness knows what it will be like for me if I am still alive 30 years from now.

But that aside, I can’t help but question, is this overkill? Do we really need a smart fireplace? Is this just technology for technology sake? Does it really fulfill a need and does it improve our daily lives?

And don’t even get me started on the potential for an apocalyptic future where the machines become so smart they take over.  I’ve seen the Terminator series.  With the advancements of AI, it feels like we are just one ChatGPT app away.

Maybe I should start getting smart and preparing myself for this.  I am sure there’s an app for that. Hasta la vista, baby.