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March of the Frankenfridges

Lezette Engelbrecht
By Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb online features editor
Johannesburg, 12 Jan 2011

One of the shows I remember being glued to while I drank Fruit-Loop-stained milk on Saturday mornings was the Jetsons. This futuristic community of flying cars and spacey outfits fascinated my young brain and what stood out most vividly was their robot maid, Rosie.

“How cool,” I thought, fantasising about the prospect of various household robots trained to pick up socks and make my bed (not realising much of the cleaning in my house was done by a real-life Rosie, but that's another subject altogether).

For this reason, I don't quite understand why the thought of supposedly “smart” appliances irks me so much, but it does. Unlike the homey, humanoid nanny of the Jetson world, the latest hi-tech appliances cut out the middle bot and just do it themselves. Surely, a device that sends an e-mail when your Clover 2% is running low, or tops up fabric softener on its own makes life more convenient. But somehow it's worrying when I have to begin relying on machines to do something like remembering to buy milk.

For years, I've hoped some enterprising college kid would come up with a contraption that does all your ironing, or a gadget that could remove those clumps of hairs from the drain. But the notion of a fridge that keeps track of its contents, and then doles out recipes to match, creeps me out.

This doesn't seem to bother the major tech manufacturers though, because the Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas, was packed with “smart” home appliances this year. Some of the gems making an appearance include WiFi-connected machines that send messages to your smartphone, fridges that play tunes from the Net, and ovens that download recipes.

Call it ego, but I do not want my oven to teach me how to put together a casserole.

There is even - the horror - a bathroom scale that allows you to tweet your weight to your friends. It's the brainchild of French company Withings, whose CEO has been using the WiFi-enabled scale to tweet his kilo-count to peers. “It's like digital peer pressure,” he cheerily explained to reporters.

Thankfully, it seems I am not alone in this aversion to hi-tech domestic wizardry. One report reveals Samsung has avoided applications that let machines send texts, because research shows consumers already suffer from information overload.

It's enough keeping up with the requests, calls, messages, e-mails and IMs just coming from work and family, I don't want to add my washing machine to the list. Also, the whole idea smacks of a kind of tech dependence those 'backward' people are always complaining about, although in this case I think they have a point.

I do not want my oven to teach me how to put together a casserole.

Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb

Take LG's upcoming fridge, for example. It will tell you when your Porcini mushrooms are looking a little ripe, or the yoghurt has gone sour. But for this w"under-fridge to be able do this, you have to tell it what food you're storing on which shelves - and enter the expiration dates.

So now you have to spend an hour manually punching in all the expiry date information to be reminded later, instead of just opening the fridge and checking the tub yourself, which takes seconds. It just doesn't seem logical.

The argument is always that these hi-tech helpers will free up more time for other things. Great, if these things included going for coffee with friends, or relaxing outside with a book. But often it just means spending more time on stuff that already takes up most of your energy - more work, more commitments, more projects, duties and to-do's.

Perhaps this is a terrible admission, but sometimes the brain-numbing activity of cooking a meal or packing my shelves is a calming escape from the draining schedule of the day. It's not like I crave quality time with the Sunlight liquid, but these mundane tasks help take the edge off, and give me some sense of control when deadlines and targets have me running at light speed.

In any case, it seems these domestic helpers aim to make you spend more time on their bizarre added extras than anything else. Samsung's Web-connected fridge lets you read the news and make shopping and to-do lists on its touch-screen. Why anyone would want to read “Deranged father slaughters family” and then make a little list for hummus and cheese is beyond me. Especially when it comes with a $3 500 price tag.

Then there's the other notorious characteristic of technology - glitches. If they haven't yet figured out how to prevent deep freezes from icing up like a Siberian windscreen, it probably won't be long before weird bugs start affecting my “intelligent” appliance. Can you imagine coming home only to find you've ordered 20kg of broccoli and turned on all four stove plates?

Looks like the only thing getting “smarter” these days are marketing teams' sales pitches, and for this reason, at least, the future of home tech remains Rosie.

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