It’s unfortunate that all these cool geeky music intercom internet-of-things voice-activated intelligent assistant wireless integrated home gewgaw gadgets have come along just about the time that I don’t give a rat’s patootie.
After 30 years as a computer teacher on top of budding trends, I’m now retired and putting puzzles together on a felt table. I’m digging the simple life. Technology has already taken enough of my time.
Things now have their own Internet. If I geared up with what’s available, I could train my house and most anything in it to respond to my reclining commands.
From bed I could water the lawn, turn on the oven, start the coffee, adjust the thermostat, and my mattress, switch on morning tunes, read the news, text the family, see who’s on the front porch and unlock the door, trigger the washer and dryer, and warm up the self-driving car.
Most of these toys are wasted on me. I tried. I bought in for a few things. Got me a Smart TV. It can project what’s on my phone screen, show me two channels at once, and trigger a myriad of apps. We use it to get to Netflix and Amazon. That’s it. All the other features lie dormant, collecting virtual dust, paid for and never enjoyed.
I have the Amazon Echo. It was a Christmas gift from our kids who talk to Alexa in their home a dozen times a day. We bought it for them two years ago.
They also have Alexa’s kids, the little Dots, who are set up in every bedroom for relaying intercom messages. The two families are tightly integrated. Alexa calls the children to dinner. The Dots help the boys with their homework. Together they build shopping lists, order supplies, and play word games. When the family travels overnight, Alexa is invited, and sometimes so is the dog. We have had ours for a year. We ask Alexa to play music from the free selections. “Play James Taylor.” That’s about it.
The kids have the Nest thermostat. They raved about it until we finally got ours installed. Now I can turn up the heat from anywhere in the world. I haven’t needed to do that yet. The light on the dial is motion sensitive, so when I wander down to the kitchen in the morning, the Nest makes a nice nightlight in the hallway. That’s our favorite feature.
We bought a new car. Oh, lordy. The center panel looks like a spaceship. If we needed to, we could sync our phones for hands-free answering, stream live from a basket of Internet apps, check the entire car’s diagnostics, and apparently many other things as the instruction manual is 187 pages long. We had the car almost a year before we figured out how to change the clock for daylight savings time.
We’ve seldom used our car’s onboard navigation because it’s locked while in motion and we don’t look at a map until we’re lost. I use my phone, or if I have four friends with me, it’s likely that all four of them are using their phones, all have the destination entered, and all are audibly narrating directions in disharmony to the driver.
Comcast sent us a voice-activated cable remote. We can talk to our box and tell it what we want to watch. Our problem is that we don’t know what we want to watch. So far since the talkie remote arrived a long time ago, I’ve only said three commands into the microphone: “NFL,” “Family Guy,” and “Closed Caption.” Susan’s two words are “Designated Survivor,” and “Blacklist.”
New technology still interests me. I still follow TechCrunch StartUps and other geek publications to see what’s new. I hold out hope that somewhere there is an app for me, something integrated with both things and stuff that will be of use to me. I buy lots of IoT gadgets for my kids and grandkids, just nothing for myself.
Most new technology doesn’t scare me. Many people worry that Alexa and Facebook are listening in on family conversations, collecting keywords for marketing purposes, scanning for telltale trends that can help them steer their industry, or perhaps they are screening for terrorists or collecting data for something more insidious.
I’m not indifferent to the threats. Technology-tinged abuse, fraud, theft, and crime concerns me deeply. I’m not spouting the lame “Go ahead, let ‘em listen. I got nothing to hide,” defense. I resist in my own feeble ways. No one, no company, no government should eavesdrop on private citizens. I refuse to slink about my house, hiding behind doors and whispering to avoid being overheard by Bezos or Zuckerberg. I’m counting on more-powerful watchdogs to protect me.
New technology I do fear – auto-missile-defense systems. Once one goes wrong, they all go wrong.
There are two toos to attend to going forward to avoid being crushed and smothered by our own conveniences: too much and too often. Too much tech too often is changing who we are and how we interact with each other, and I do not think it’s for the better.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.