Got this e-mail yesterday:

Hi Johannes.Ernst,

Your Aria battery level is low. Replace your batteries as soon as possible.

Your Aria scale is powered by 4 standard 1.5V AA batteries. This type of battery can be found wherever batteries are sold.

To replace the batteries in your Aria…

It took me a little while to process this … here I sit at my desk, and the scale in the master bathroom decides to e-mail me to tell me what it wants.

What’s next? Perhaps it shouldn’t be e-mailing me. Perhaps it should simply place an order at Amazon for the right batteries. If it can e-mail, it can also place orders over the web.

Should I be surprised if next time I open the door for the Fedex guy, he hands me a package addressed like this:

Ms. Aria Scale
Upstairs bathroom
The Ernst Residence
…

with a little note saying “please take this package upstairs, open the bottom battery compartment, and insert the batteries, dust the machine, etc” in response of which it will say, with a humanoid voice, “Thank you, my most faithful servant.” And that I will be for it, whether I want it or not.

Of course, next year, I will be buying more devices that connect to the internet. Like a refrigerator, or a garage door. You can imagine how this continues. “This message is from your garage door. My left spring is a little squeaky, please buy some lubricant by tomorrow”. Which will be heard by the car — and the car will disagree with me when wanting to drive to the restaurant for dinner, saying “but the lubricant for the garage door is just a 2 minute side trip, do that first”.

Of course, the refrigerator will also listen in, and opine: “You ate all that rich food for lunch, it would be better to walk.” And a year or two down the road, the car will simply refuse to start if I ignore the “advice” of the refrigerator.

And that, boys and girls, will be how our new overlords will take over: through the guise of making my life easier and better. After all, how is being told that the batteries are low in the scale a bad thing?