The Future is Slowly Killing Me

Technology-Induced Depression and Other Follies of Our Modern Digital Age I was shaking uncontrollably. It started with my hands, and I remember holding them to my face, looking at my own flesh as though it were foreign. The tremor quickly traveled down my arms, towards my legs, and within seconds my whole body was vibrating…

The Internet of Paperweights: Keeping IoT Alive

Alphabet, Google’s parent holding company, recently announced that one of the smart thermostat companies they acquired, Revolv (not Nest), would be closing up shop and shutting down their servers on May 15, effectively rendering the Revolv to be nothing more than an ugly, overpriced piece of technologized wall-art. Though this news broke at the start…

Creating Smart Assholes

Just because you made a machine “smart” doesn’t mean you made it intelligent. Smart homes, IoT, AI, ubicomp, robotics, ambient media, pervasive computing – all are words that in one form or another describe our attempt to embed digital intelligence into the otherwise dumb, lifeless devices around us. However, as we engineers so often do,…