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Every year it seems the tech industry comes up with more fascinating gadgets to improve our lives, from color-changing cars to smart sprinklers that automatically turn on when they sense the garden is getting too dry. But there are times when we wonder: Just because the tech industry can do all these nifty things, should it?
This year’s CES included some products that at first glance feel more creepy than cool. Like an exercise bike built into a work desk to power your computer, or a device that covers your mouth in the real world while you’re chatting on a conference call or playing a game. Perhaps most eyebrow raising was a sensor for your toilet bowl, meant to analyze your pee. And while the ever expanding push of cameras into our lives means potentially more silliness as people livestream their own Great British Bake Off-style moments from their oven, there’s the very real question of how many internet-connected cameras are too many, and which companies we can trust with access to them.
In each case, these products might have good reasons for being, but we have to ask if they might also be helping pave the way toward the dystopian future we’ve been warned about in sci-fi over the decades.
«We have seen so many of those things that were science fiction back in the ’80s and ’90s that became science fact,» said Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose presence at this year’s CES unintentionally hit on people’s growing anxieties about tech getting out of control. Schwarzenegger, after all, starred as the murderous villain, and hero, T-800 robots in the Terminator franchise of films. «In most of my movies, the machines were an enemy,» he told the show’s audience without a smidge of irony.
He did, however, say that companies appear to be learning from his various Hollywood roles, «that for technology to really work, it has to work with humans and not against us.»
Here are some products that muddle that line, no matter how well intentioned their inventors are.In the name of protecting your conversations
Blending our work and home lives was one of the biggest struggles of the pandemic. Whether it was kids with cabin fever interrupting work, or dueling conference calls between spouses working from the same spare room in the house, we all had those moments where Get Smart’s cone of silence would’ve been welcome. That’s where Shiftall’s Mutalk believes it can help.
The device looks like an eerie tech version of a mouth gag, but it’s actually meant to help you talk more easily in the virtual and work worlds you may be interacting with.
