2007oct28. I am consistently astounded every time I see a reference to the Kitchen of Tomorrow. It’s there, just beyond our grasp, if we could only reach out have our refrigerator tell us what our eyes already do. This futuristic excerpt appears in an Discover article about The Coming Internet Data Jam:
The current packet-receipt feedback system (known as TCP) has worked wonderfully for years to control the flow of Internet traffic, but it won’t be able to cope with the coming jam, when fridges will scan the RFID chip on a milk carton and send an alert when the expiration date arrives. “Whether we like it or not, [Internet equipment giant] Cisco will network everything. Soon our glasses will tell the kitchen they’re empty,” Doyle says. That vast amount of traffic will make the Internet catastrophically fragile. “We could wake up one morning and nothing works.”
Our glasses will tell the kitchen they’re empty. Please explain to me why this information needs to be transferred to the kitchen ... at all ... and once you’ve done that, lemme know why that information needs to go out over the internet. Is that so some goddamned advertiser can suggest a product that would adequately fill the newly-created void the glasses suffer from? Is it so I can call up my house from my car as I return home from work, curious whether or not the glasses are empty yet (“oh boy oh boy oh boy, I bet they totally are!!!”)? Will this information appear on my myspace page?
OMG DUDE YUV GOT MT GLAZS!
You gadgetwhores can keep your networking crap out of my kitchen for the rest of my life, thanks. I’ve got it under control. I can “see” the expiration date on products with my eyes, and I also use these appliances to confirm the emptiness of my glasses before I pour an adult beverage into one or more of them. The way this is supposed to work is that the futurists come up with a problem, the technologists create a gadget, and then the marketers sell the “solution” by repeatedly explaining the “problem.” The problem here is that there is no problem, which is usually the problem anyway with most of the junk pushed in our face.
