Rise of the machines

The term was coined in 1999 by Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) innovator Kevin Ashton, four years before Filippo wrote his story, but IoT seized the popular imagination only last year, when Google acquired the home automation company Nest for $3.2 billion, when all it had to offer was a thermostat. But then, it was a clever and stylish thermostat which could learn its owner’s preferences, and it had its own Android app. But what if the thermostat conspires with the aware refrigerator and the peevish hammer drill? Philippo’s story suggests that home appliances and white goods getting too chummy can add up to AI free will, with savagely restrictive consequences for human free will.

Philippo refers to a conglomerate of intelligent appliances as a “bleb”, a variant of “blob” which entered the literature of the life sciences in the 17th century and is now used to describe developments like blisters in the eye. Think of it as an unnatural accretion. Philippo’s protagonist Kaz, who works for the US government’s anti-terrorist snooping agency which everyone lovingly calls “Aunty”, finds blebs everywhere and is increasingly paranoid.

So would you be, if you saw a rogue Segway driven by a Xerox machine. Or a woman’s purse riding a skateboard past mannequins in store windows who (who, not which — these are things trying to become persons) are alive with intelligent clothing and jewellery, swaying like undersea fronds of kelp. Obsessed with machines who gang up in search of world conquest, he goes to a mashpit in a disused factory. You know the setting from the movies — an industrial landscape full of oil drums which the villain sets rolling in his final frenzy. The fixture is a prizefight between a belt-sander studded with vise-grips and pliers and an autonomous lawnmower ridden by a coffee-maker.

Meanwhile, at home, a chair, a quilt, an iPod, a vacuum cleaner and a food processor get together. The surfaces of intelligent objects exhibit the van der Waals interaction, so they can connect physically using the subtle force which keeps a gecko attached to the ceiling. And having connected, their first instinct is to violently seduce Kaz’s girlfriend. No preliminaries or niceties here. Not even a token attempt at discussing the integral calculus or catastrophe theory with the lady. In the first encounter of its sex life, the bleb is as vile as a character in a rugby song.

However, this is just the tragic flaw marring a fascinating idea. Given the compulsive misomechany that humankind is prone to (the business model of the Terminator series), why is an anxiety about household machines physically ganging up not more prevalent in the arts and media? The prevalent IoT dystopia consists of mere irritation about the all-seeing Internet, but the system itself is seen to consist of harmless bits of merchandise chirruping happily to intelligent stores and homes in need of them, or a GPS chip in lost baggage cheerily emailing its location to its ecstatic owner.

Why doesn’t IoT trigger the Industrial Age dread of the rise of the machines? It’s designed to be pervasive. It will be in our toothbrushes and underwear, and we are merely amused? I’ve had enough of the Disney version. Now, I want more of the John Pilger version. And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon has whetted a strange appetite.