Tech is so ingrained in our daily lives that we don’t even notice it anymore, which isn’t always a bad thing. It’s great that we can make the most mundane parts of life a little easier to bear, but can we all agree that we’ve gone too far when even our rubbish bins are robotic?
Knectek Labs are hawking a self-sealing ‘smart’ bin at $150 a pop. It opens by motion sensor, and when the bag fills up, it’s sealed off with the press of a button. And – actually, that’s all.
For something that is clearly designed for the most boujee of germaphobes, it doesn’t exactly cover all the bases. If I’m going to be paying more than twenty bucks for a bin, it better take itself all the way out to the kerbside.
Robotic bins are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homeware gadgetry gone mad. Spend five minutes on Indiegogo and you’ll find all manners of entrepreneurs trying to make sure every appliance in your home can be monitored with an app.
Am I the only one who finds it all a little unsettling? Maybe I just watched that terrifying Disney movie Smart House too young. That scene where the kids get trapped inside by a Suburban White Mom AI haunts me to this day.
If you do happen to have a tonne of disposable income in this economy, and consider yourself a technophile, maybe you’d like try the FridgeCam – because it’s not really a surveillance state until you can spy on your own groceries.
There’s an app-activated bathroom assistant that uses ‘electrolysed water’ to blast your bowl, and if interacting with your own pets is too much effort for you, you could spend $200 on an AI cat toy.
I don’t mean to sound like too much of a boomer here – I don’t think iPads are the downfall of civilisation. But there’s a point at which we’ve taken ‘there’s an app for that’ too far, and a robo-bin is definitely it.