Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.
Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.
The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn’t know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.
someone tried to sell me a fucking AI fridge the other day. Why the fuck would I want my fridge to “learn my habits?” I don’t even like my phone “learning my habits!”
Why does a fridge need to know your habits?
It has to keep the food cold all the time. The light has to come on when you open the door.
What could it possibly be learning
Hi Zron, you seem to really enjoy eating shredded cheese at 2:00am! For your convenience, we’ve placed an order for 50lbs of shredded cheese based on your rate of consumption. Thanks!
We also took the liberty of canceling your health insurance to help protect the shareholders from your abhorrent health expenses in the far future
If your fridge spies after you, certain people can have better insights into healthiness of your food habits, how organized you are, how often things go bad and are thrown out, what medicine (requiring to be kept cold) do you put there and how often do you use it.
That will then affect your insurances, your credit rating, and possibly many other ratings other people are interested in.
I wish products followed your lead and had no AI features, 1995 Toyota Corolla :/
I think you’re being sarcastic, but I unironically agree. Cars and fridges can, and should stay dumb, with the notable exception of battery management systems in electric vehicles. That’s the single acceptable use case for a car IMHO.
Oh I absolutely agree, some things don’t need to be “smart”.
Imagine if someone put a microchip in a potato peeler claiming that it would add features like “sensing the amount of pressure applied to the potato to ensure clean peels”. The reason they haven’t done that is that data would only benefit the user, and they can’t think of a way to have it benefit the company’s profit margins.
I think car play is a wonderful feature. My car should absolutely allow syncing up to my phone. I don’t think it should telemetry or anything like that though. But I think internal process monitoring should also be a thing. Display error codes, show me that a tire is low, monitor a battery, etc. but the manufacturer shouldn’t get that info. My car shouldn’t know my sex life, and the manufacturer definitely shouldn’t
So I can see what you like to eat, then it can tell your grocery store, then your grocery store can raise the prices on those items. That’s the point. It’s the same thing with those memberships and coupon apps. That’s the end goal.
They can see what you like to eat by what you’re buying, LOL. No, not this.
A fridge can give them information on how do you eat.
I still want this fridge. (Source)
it doesn’t seem all that hard to make, as long as you don’t mind the severely reduced flexibility in capacity and glass bottles shattering against each other at the bottom
Not to mention the increased expense, loudness, greater difficulty cleaning, and many more points of failure!
Now THIS I could get behind! Still not AI though. it’s a very dumb timer system that would be very useful. 1950’s tech could do this!
always xkcd
And it would improve your life zero. That is what is absurd about LLM’s in their current iteration, they provide almost no benefit to a vast majority of people.
All a learning model would do for a fridge is send you advertisements for whatever garbage food is on sale. Could it make recipes based on what you have? Tell it you want to slowly get healthier and have it assist with grocery selection?
Nah, fuck you and buy stuff.
Exactly, it’s entirely about extra monetization. They all think in terms of hype and money, never in terms of life improvement.
I’d actually love AI to control something like a home assistant setup by learning how I like things and predicting change (mind you I still need to get it set up at all). But most people don’t even want a smart home.
Make something that makes the unpleasant parts of life easier and people will be happy with it
I want AI in my fridge for sure. Grocery shopping sucks. Forgetting how old something was sucks. Letting all the cool out to crawl around to see what I have sucks.
I want my fridge to be like the Sims, just get deliveries or pickup the order. Fill it out and get told what ingredients I have. Bonus points if you can just tell me what recipes I can cook right now, even better if I can ask for time frame.
That would be sick!
Still not going to give ecorp all of my data or put some half back internet of stings device on my WiFi for it. But it would be cool.
Ye, that’d be sick! and that’s also not what was being sold! this fridge did none of that. What exactly made it “AI” I didn’t bother to find out, but I work in IT. I guarantee it wasn’t this. Also, not convinced I want my fridge to be able to spend my money for me. I want to be able to have a Ramen month if I need/want
Automatic spending definitely takes next level of trust for sure!
Absolutely this. There IS a scenario in which I would love a “smart” or “AI” fridge, but it’s gotta be damn impressive to even be worth my time.
It needs to know everything in my fridge, how long it’s been there and it’s expiration date, and I want it to build grocery lists for me based on what is low, and let me know ahead of time that I should use something up that’s going bad soon. Bonus points if it recommends some options for how to do that based on my tastes. And I want to do this without having to manually input or remove everything.
But we’re still SO far from being able to do this reliably, let alone at any kind of acceptable price point, and yet fridge makers keep shoving out dumb fridges with a screen on them and calling them “smart”. I hate it.
For sure playing ads on my fridge or just spying on me aren’t “smart” at all to me.
Would you be willing to destroy the whole planet in order make millions of these fridges?
A couple planets! /s
I would be willing to never have one in my life time just to see climate change slowed to a rate nature can naturally adapt and people can afford to adjust to honestly.
I dont forsee it being any worse then food waste and wasted grocery trips are for me.
Computer vision, a couple services, a db, and network access can be pretty light weight. Any extra voice, natural language interface, etc is probably overkill and without special hardware (and the ecogical cost of that) not worth it on an energy use stand point.
All speculation of course
I’m still pissed about the fact that I can’t buy a reasonably priced TV that doesn’t have WiFi. I should never have left my old LG Plasma bolted to the wall of my previous house when I sold it. That thing had a fantastic picture and doubled as a space heater in the winter.
Projector gang checking in 🤓📽️
Everything alright here?
You can always join us in the peaceful realm of select input.
(there are still WiFi-free options)
what’s the affordable option for daytime viewing with the curtains open?
Audio description.
To remind you when should go to buy groceries haha
Jian-Yang wants a smart fridge. To make you feel bad. Because you’re fat and you’re poor.