The Internet of Judgy Things. How smart fridges can bully you?

Now we can officially declare that we live in an era where people are not the only ones who can think. It may sound a little like a sentence from some fiction but the reality is as it is. It’s not a breakthrough announcement on the declaration of Independence by the United States of Robots. Nonetheless, machines are already showing signs of a good logical way of thinking.

The interesting fact was revealed on the 9th of September when one American developer tweeted that recently his smart fridge sent him an email with the statistics on the past month. The kitchen appliance calculated how many times the door was open and to the owner’s own amusement thanked him for the environment protection efforts.

Dan Hon, his smart fridge and smart weights

Dan Hon, an American developer, kept sharing his experiences in communication with his fridge. He made a point in saying that it’s interesting in terms of what else this fridge can do and questioned those functions’ usefulness. The developer also expressed his fear that the fridge might trespass on his confidentiality in some way. To draw an example he tweeted about the incident with the weights that said his absolutely healthy toddler needs to lose some weight and congratulated his wife on her losing a little weight. Maybe the calculation process was right, but Dan Hon thinks it’s hard to bring the understandable format of some things to the machine as his wife was after pregnancy and had postpartum syndrome and their toddler is in fact in good health. One of his tweets said:

Nevertheless, the developer was annoyed by the accident but he will keep receiving emails that were confirmed in his latest tweets, and also made a joke that some day the fridge might decide on shortening the times its doors are opened.

The tweets brought the attention of a wider audience

The tweets brought the attention of a wider audience and started the thread of discussions. The opinions were different as the themes they were touching. The tweets varied from jokes on the future of humanity now that devices can think in quite a logical way to the light anger of some users that machines should answer unless they are spoken to and just keep their mouth shut. Others were obsessed with the next possible move of the smart fridge and proposed their theories of what may come next. Obviously, they were joking but imagination spiked those days in tweeters.

One of the users tweeted about electric administration by the fridge the next time his owners surpass the allowed by the fridge amount of times. Some wondered who would want to buy such a fridge and connect this thing to the Internet to which Dan Hon replied with a tweet that their landlord changed it because the old one broke at the beginning of the pandemic and yes it is his fault for unwanted emails from his fridge. But see how interestingly everything turned out, he even shared a screenshot of the onboarding screen of the app for smart fridge and once again joked on how judging from the picture it looks like his loved ones are other home appliances. We think the most hilarious one where the user said:

Reaction

The whole situation sparked vivid discussions on Twitter. It’s no wonder when home appliances know for themselves what weight you should have or how many times it`s optimal to open your fridge`s door. However, people don’t want to see the recommendations like “don’t open your fridge so often” – it looks like spying of some sort. With time it will show what measures should be brought up in real actions but for now, we can only laugh at similar things happening here and there on the Internet.