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justaprogressive

(2,655 posts)
Thu Jan 9, 2025, 02:11 PM Jan 9

The Brave Little Toaster by Cory Doctorow

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The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year's CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908

Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there's a credulous, Poe's-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/

As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the "Internet of Things" hype we were mired in. It's called "The Brave Little Toaster", and it was published in MIT Tech Review's TRSF anthology in 2011:

http://bestsf.net/trsf-the-best-new-science-fiction-technology-review-2011/


https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox
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The Brave Little Toaster by Cory Doctorow (Original Post) justaprogressive Jan 9 OP
Loony Goony UpInArms Jan 9 #1
Worst case is if the appliance has to transmit your data to the cloud instead of doing the language in the appliance. nt Bernardo de La Paz Jan 9 #2
Cory's URL for this is a nod to Douglas Adams' take on the subject - Hitchhiker's radio series 2 muriel_volestrangler Jan 9 #3

Bernardo de La Paz

(52,026 posts)
2. Worst case is if the appliance has to transmit your data to the cloud instead of doing the language in the appliance. nt
Thu Jan 9, 2025, 02:40 PM
Jan 9

muriel_volestrangler

(102,852 posts)
3. Cory's URL for this is a nod to Douglas Adams' take on the subject - Hitchhiker's radio series 2
Thu Jan 9, 2025, 03:05 PM
Jan 9

Here it is - the 2nd part with some animation added a couples of decades later:

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