ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-24-19)
If you're as cynical as I am you probably already know that we're all headed for Hell in a hand basket. And if you attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, you could get an idea of what Hell is going to look like when we get there, and whether the hand basket will get us there with an automatic pilot. And because I care about my readers, I am going to summarize the important things you need to know about the CES so you don't have to feel bad for missing it, and can concentrate on feeling bad for completely unrelated reasons.
There were many robotic and automatic devices this year at the show, and many seminars to attend. if you bought a robot at last year's show, you could program it to sit in on an event entitled, "Trends Reshaping the Future of Mobility and Connectivity," and that way you could Reshape your own Mobility by walking across the street to the Diamond Cabaret and Reshape your Connectivity there without missing out on anything.
Featured at this year's convention, the Royole Flexpai is the world's first folding smartphone. It has a flexible spine that allows it to be bent in half, enabling you to put it into your pocket, provided that you literally have deep pockets. The idea seems like a case of over-innovation to me, but when I thought it over a little more, I realized that the phone could save you the embarrassment of butt-dialing someone, unless your butt butt-unfolds the phone first.
If you love folded laundry, but without the drudgery, the Foldimate automatic laundry folder is for you. The very first thing you should do is feed one of those folding phones in there and see if you can break the phone and the laundry folder at the same time while they are both still under warranty. I can think of a thousand things I'd like to fold, but just never had the means, motive or opportunity. For instance, I've always wondered what my cat would look like perfectly folded. What about all the businesses that are about to fold due to all the robots parading around at the CES? Just feed your failing business into the Foldimate along with a bankruptcy lawyer and presto!
If you want to take the perfect shot of yourself, AirSelfie is a drone that will snap the photo from the air. The flying camera will shoot a picture of you along with a bunch of people calling Homeland Security.
An innovation called the Y-Brush offers to clean all your teeth in 10 seconds. You stick some toothpaste into the tray, shaped like a set of dentures, and let the automatic bristles do all the work. Your teeth will be healthier than they've ever been, which makes it all the more tragic that you died of embarrassment when somebody caught you using this goofy-looking gadget. Luckily they will be able to identify you easily with your impeccable dental records.
There were also a few tragedies at the show. A videotape that went viral showed a self-driving Tesla running over a promotional robot that was in a parking lot near Congress Hall, just the type of thing you would expect to happen at CES. My theory is that it was no accident, but the distraught robot threw itself in front of the moving car. The robot was probably hired as a valet to park cars, and now that cars are able to drive themselves, it was out of a job. What automatically comes around automatically goes around....
People are looking into the future, and it doesn't look to pretty. All these robotics are taking over the factories, doing the assembly more efficiently, faster and with no coffee breaks. They can even program them to complain about the boss at regular intervals, and make fun of his hair, which looks like a rug that no robot would have assembled, because they would have done a lot better job. Then you go outside to catch a cigarette, and who's out there too? The robots, smoking away more efficiently and they don't get lung cancer. Anyway, my point is that nobody is thinking ahead to the ramifications of these household robots. I take out the garbage, I chop the firewood, I kill spiders, I do all kinds of useful things that I can't think of at the moment, but trust me, they are important. If somebody comes along and invents a robot that can do all of these things, exactly what is MY job going to be? Sure, I'm extremely handsome and droll and know all the gags from old episodes of "Get Smart," but a robot has all day to comb the internet for clever things to say. I'm going to come home from work, say something that I think is going to make my wife laugh, and that damned robot is going to be say something even funnier, sitting there smoking a cigarette with the laundry folded, all the dishes done and about 12 dead spiders there in a pile. And my wife is smoking a cigarette too, and she never used to smoke before. Do you get my drift or do I have to spell it out for you?
If you're as cynical as I am you probably already know that we're all headed for Hell in a hand basket. And if you attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, you could get an idea of what Hell is going to look like when we get there, and whether the hand basket will get us there with an automatic pilot. And because I care about my readers, I am going to summarize the important things you need to know about the CES so you don't have to feel bad for missing it, and can concentrate on feeling bad for completely unrelated reasons.
There were many robotic and automatic devices this year at the show, and many seminars to attend. if you bought a robot at last year's show, you could program it to sit in on an event entitled, "Trends Reshaping the Future of Mobility and Connectivity," and that way you could Reshape your own Mobility by walking across the street to the Diamond Cabaret and Reshape your Connectivity there without missing out on anything.
Featured at this year's convention, the Royole Flexpai is the world's first folding smartphone. It has a flexible spine that allows it to be bent in half, enabling you to put it into your pocket, provided that you literally have deep pockets. The idea seems like a case of over-innovation to me, but when I thought it over a little more, I realized that the phone could save you the embarrassment of butt-dialing someone, unless your butt butt-unfolds the phone first.
If you love folded laundry, but without the drudgery, the Foldimate automatic laundry folder is for you. The very first thing you should do is feed one of those folding phones in there and see if you can break the phone and the laundry folder at the same time while they are both still under warranty. I can think of a thousand things I'd like to fold, but just never had the means, motive or opportunity. For instance, I've always wondered what my cat would look like perfectly folded. What about all the businesses that are about to fold due to all the robots parading around at the CES? Just feed your failing business into the Foldimate along with a bankruptcy lawyer and presto!
If you want to take the perfect shot of yourself, AirSelfie is a drone that will snap the photo from the air. The flying camera will shoot a picture of you along with a bunch of people calling Homeland Security.
An innovation called the Y-Brush offers to clean all your teeth in 10 seconds. You stick some toothpaste into the tray, shaped like a set of dentures, and let the automatic bristles do all the work. Your teeth will be healthier than they've ever been, which makes it all the more tragic that you died of embarrassment when somebody caught you using this goofy-looking gadget. Luckily they will be able to identify you easily with your impeccable dental records.
There were also a few tragedies at the show. A videotape that went viral showed a self-driving Tesla running over a promotional robot that was in a parking lot near Congress Hall, just the type of thing you would expect to happen at CES. My theory is that it was no accident, but the distraught robot threw itself in front of the moving car. The robot was probably hired as a valet to park cars, and now that cars are able to drive themselves, it was out of a job. What automatically comes around automatically goes around....
People are looking into the future, and it doesn't look to pretty. All these robotics are taking over the factories, doing the assembly more efficiently, faster and with no coffee breaks. They can even program them to complain about the boss at regular intervals, and make fun of his hair, which looks like a rug that no robot would have assembled, because they would have done a lot better job. Then you go outside to catch a cigarette, and who's out there too? The robots, smoking away more efficiently and they don't get lung cancer. Anyway, my point is that nobody is thinking ahead to the ramifications of these household robots. I take out the garbage, I chop the firewood, I kill spiders, I do all kinds of useful things that I can't think of at the moment, but trust me, they are important. If somebody comes along and invents a robot that can do all of these things, exactly what is MY job going to be? Sure, I'm extremely handsome and droll and know all the gags from old episodes of "Get Smart," but a robot has all day to comb the internet for clever things to say. I'm going to come home from work, say something that I think is going to make my wife laugh, and that damned robot is going to be say something even funnier, sitting there smoking a cigarette with the laundry folded, all the dishes done and about 12 dead spiders there in a pile. And my wife is smoking a cigarette too, and she never used to smoke before. Do you get my drift or do I have to spell it out for you?
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