The $20,000 Light Switch
AI-powered robots are finally entering suburbia. The 1X Neo begins shipping to homeowners next year. According to this article, it can turn your lights on and off, and maybe open a door. If you want it to do anything else, however, you’ll have to grant camera access to your home so that somebody half the world away can operate the robot with an xBox controller. Which doesn’t seem like a good idea at all, but hey, maybe you disagree. The cost for the robot is $20,000, but… if you are one of the 40,000 people UPS just let go or one of the 30,000 people whom Amazon is replacing with AI-powered robots, and you don’t have twenty grand laying around right now, you can still get one for just $499 per month.
To turn your lights on and off.
What a bargain.
My youngest son and his mom have an Alexa (which I call “the box”). Seemingly once a week, they ask it to turn on the living room light, or the basement light, and it refuses to comply, so then they ask it again and again in increasing annoyance, until I calmly walk over to the light switch and flip it, at which point their annoyance turns from the box to me. And then I usually say something sarcastic and they usually tell me to shut up.
But I have seen this movie, people.
The night I graduated high school, after we’d all tossed our caps into the air, we took a bunch of cars to the drive-in and saw Terminator. When dawn arrived, we all drove in caravan formation to Ocean City, Maryland for a week, where I kept thinking about Terminator in between bouts of teenage partying.
I know how this movie ends.
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I am delighted any time I learn a new UK-ism. Over the years, my pal Tim Lebbon has taught me that bog = bathroom, slash = pissing, and pissed = drunk. More recently, Gemma Amor has been teaching me UK-ism terms of endearment, such as “pickle”. This morning, she taught me a new one, when she said that this Blog entry “gave her kittens” for a moment. Apparently, in the UK, giving someone kittens is not the nice thing it is here in the States.
(Incidentally, I wonder if “retirement” means something different in the UK than it does here, given that both Gemma and Sarah Pinborough were initially concerned by that Blog entry. But no, I guess that can’t be the case, since neither Lebbon or Rio Youers seemed concerned. Of course, Lebbon might be currently pissed and having a slash in the bog — perhaps with his pickle—, and Rio is half-Canadian, so who knows where he is right now).
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Speaking of the UK and Tim Lebbon and social media, Joe Hill tricked some folks into thinking I was in Nottingham yesterday.
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My pal Maria Hathorne (production assistant on DEAD FORMAT and daughter of my long-time pal, comic artist Mike Hawthorne) is Kickstartering her second art book. The campaign ends this Saturday. Give it a look here and consider backing, if you have the means.
Below is a sample.
