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.<\/p>\n
Should I be surprised if next time I open the door for the Fedex guy, he hands me a package addressed like this:<\/p>\n
Ms. Aria Scale
\nUpstairs bathroom
\nThe Ernst Residence
\n…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,228,29],"tags":[272,274,273],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big_picture","category-culture","category-prediction","tag-aria","tag-fitbit","tag-scale","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1429,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}