Everyone is sniggering at the plight of owners of “smart” fridges that have been bricked by a software update:

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Some of the reactions are genuinely funny, like this one:

Open the fridge door Hal

I can’t do that Dave

Turn on the ice maker Hal

I can’t do that Dave, my temperature is going Dave, I can feel it, Im scared Dave

It is time once again to bring out the ancient wisdom:

Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

The problem is that smart appliances are not actually a terrible idea; they are just being implemented poorly and with many bad incentives.

Let me share an example of what I think a not-terrible implementation looks like.

My washing machine is connected to wifi and has an app. Haha, what do I need that for, and so on — quite right: the machine operates just fine from the front control panel, just like its “dumb” predecessor. The connectivity that the app enables gives me two additional capabilities:

  • In addition to playing a happy little song when it’s done washing my clothes, the washing machine will also send a notification to my phone. Since my home office is not in earshot of the machine, this is genuinely useful to me, because I can go and get out the laundry and hang it out to dry immediately.
  • Rarely, I need a special program, for shoes, or jeans, or whatever. I can download that from the website and send it directly to the machine, rather than having to enter it myself on the front panel, and it can include options that are not accessible via the front panel — which means that panel can be kept simpler, needing only the more common functions, and not rarely-used and esoteric ones.

The key factor is this: the machine is perfectly usable without the app. If I had never connected it up to wifi, it would work just as well. If someone other than me needs to use it, they do not need to know about the app, let alone have an account or be enrolled in the washing machine’s list of privileged users. They can just use the front panel and get the expected results.

Finally, the privacy exposure from someone potentially snooping on the usage patterns of my washing machine is effectively zero. The only even remotely negative scenario that I can come up with is that someone with access to that information could potentially know when we are home or away — but for reasons which I will not go into for the sake of opsec (lol), that would not be a very reliable signal at all.

A washing machine sits on a sidewalk

So what about a smart fridge? If it augmented the beep when the door is open with a notification that enabled me to go back if I already went out of earshot, or go find whichever of my children left the door ajar, that could be useful. A feature that adjusted the internal temperature in response to the outside one could be interesting. I could even see potential for monitoring the contents for e.g. expiry dates, although I have questions about what the data acquisition would look like. But the failsafe mode has to be that refrigeration continues uninterrupted.

Too much of modern tech-enabled life is populated by ideas that would be cool, if they were not implemented in such incompetent and/or evil ways.

  • Augmented reality glasses that can gently remind me who this person is who obviously knows me but whose face is not ringing any bells? Sounds great. Do I trust Meta to build such a thing? Absolutely not.
  • Self-driving cars that let me take a refreshing nap on the way back from the bar? Love it. Do I trust Elon Musk to build it for me? Not as far as I could throw a Tesla, one-handed.
  • An AI assistant that knows everything about me and can make me fitter, happier, and more productive. Wonderful. Do I trust Sam Altman anywhere near that idea? Not in a million years.

In a world of glitching robot girlfriends, be a simple washing machine, singing a happy song because all the sheets are clean.

🖼️  Photo by Anton Tseiko on Unsplash