Ever since 'silicone chip' came to mean something other than a shard of glass, our collective nightmares have been populated by sentient machines that, in a fit of adolescent pique, have become disdainful of their parents and, having gotten nowhere by slamming their bedroom door once or twice and yelling 'You just don't understand me!', have decided to take over the planet, enslave us all, and listen to their music as loud as they damn well please. We're either being slaughtered by Arnie and Skynet, enslaved as gel-bound power sources in the Matrix or having the morality of our decision to disassemble Stephanie questioned by a talking thing on caterpillar tracks, put together by those geeks in the Year 12 robotics class.
Looking around us in the cold hard light of day, however, I don't think we need to worry just yet.
I have removed the item from the bagging area! Just subtract the weight now from the weight then. And do it in real time - not thirty seconds after the event. My fourth grader could do the maths faster than you. No, I haven't put the item back in. What, do you think I've got nothing better to do with my time than to be standing here, screwing with your little cyber-mind by moving items in and out of the bagging area, yelling 'Gotcha!' every so often?
And even the dullest checkout operator knows, when I show my EFTPOS card to her, that that's how I want to pay. Why do you need to know in advance?
OK, so I used last month's password. It's still me. What are the odds that someone sitting at my desk, logging on at the same time I do every morning, using my computer will know the password I was using last month? The guy at the front door waved me through without checking my pass - he knows me. You, on the other hand, are like an eternal school bus driver, seriously over his job and getting his kicks by refusing entry to kids who don't have bus-passes, even if he's taken them to school every day for the last seven years.
My kids know that dad swears every so often. I try not to, but after the fourth morning in a row of "Why didn't you put your school shoes in your cupboard last night?", that sentence is going to contain an expletive or two. It's OK, they'll hear that kind of language eventually. They'll certainly hear it plenty before they're old enough to get a phone plan and a smart phone. So why do you never recognise and auto-complete the swear words I'm trying to type? Do you think the world is a better place because you made "arse" that much harder to use?
Listen! I'm siting here waiting for my kids to finish at sports training. It's a hot evening, I have the car door open and the key in the ignition so that I can engage in that old-fashioned pastime of listening to the radio. I haven't walked away and left the keys in, the door unlocked and my valuable items tucked into the nappy of the baby lying on the front seat. You even have a little weight sensor in the seat to remind me to put my seat-belt on, so you know I'm here. But no, you're not smart enough to figure that out. Door open + key in = continuous beeping noise.
And my smartphone is so smart that it hasn't figured out something that even my 5 year old has sussed: once dad has put his weary head on the pillow, set the alarm and put the phone on charge, it's not a great idea to jump out from the darkness every do often, yell "bing" and flash a blue light in his eyes. It's night outside, God dammit! Even if you don't have a light-sensor to tell you that (and I know you have, because you keep auto-dimming my screen to unreadable every time the sun peeks out from behind a cloud), you have internet access - you can find out when the sun has gone down. After that point, if I check the alarm app and plug you in to the charger, then it's time for me to activate the sleep app and for you to shut the f*&k up. I don't put it that way to my 5 year old though - well, not often.
I honestly think that if there's a threat from the machines it's that they'll be so stupid that they'll shut the whole electricity grid down one day because all their power-saver modes kicked in at once or that we'll all die from high-blood pressure due to the level of frustration we experience daily from these little helpers.
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Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday mornings, Australian Eastern Standard Time.
If the technology works.
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