The Virtual Reality Artificially Intelligent Vacuum Cleaner Cell Phone App
A Tech Tour of a World at War
Our 25 year old vacuum cleaner was starting to wheeze. I smelled the faint toxic odor of smoldering PCB insulation. It was time to retire the machine and buy a new one.
There are few brick and mortar appliance vendors nor even department stores around anymore. I didn't want to drive to some big box retail center, endlessly circle around looking for parking, and then return to discover my car had been stolen to be used as a disposable battering ram for a smash and grab robbery somewhere else. I will write something soon about my thoughts, as a grizzled trial lawyer, about the American civil and criminal justice system, such as it is. But that's for another day. Today, it is vacuum cleaners.
Perhaps I should have simply bought some virtual reality glasses instead of a new vacuum cleaner. The house would remain a mess, but, wearing Apple, Meta or Google goggles could make everything seem alright, kind of like 'reporting' as the news cartels like to call it. But like everything else about manufacturing a narrative and virtual reality, real reality eventually bites you and your artificially intelligent delusions come down to just so much artificially induced stupidity.
I shopped on line for vacuums, studiously avoiding the top 30 "hits": they were all Amazon vendors who most likely paid to promote themselves to the top of my Web search. Since the passage of Bill Clinton's Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Internet has spiraled downward into the stultifying commercialized wasteland we know today. Still, with patience and tenacity, you can struggle through the tangle of hype and "verified" AI-generated five star customer reviews. I suppose that vacuity is to be expected when shopping for vacuum cleaners. But while shopping I heard this do-loop of a mid-1960s not yet cadaverous Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones performing "Satisfaction (I Can't Get No)," ranting about mindless laundry detergent and cigarette advertising "supposed to fire my imagination"... until, decades later, Mick Jagger himself had been absorbed by the hive-mind collective and become a prune-faced front man for capitalism.
But I have lost the thread of my story about vacuum cleaners. Or maybe I've lost my mind. Or found it again after all these years.
The first thing I noticed about the vacuum cleaners were the prices! A decent one now costs as much as a motorcycle used to cost. But motorcycles now cost the same as a car once did; and a car today costs as much as a starter house used to cost; and a starter house is now an industrial scale slapdash micro-home no bigger than a cardboard box that's incredibly expensive, but so cramped and tiny that you can clean it with an electrostatically charged cat. And that's what we call progress.
I guess.
But some things have gotten better.
Look at that picture at the head of this essay.., it's a much altered mid-last century Hoover advertisement. The original ad showed a cheerful, carefully coiffed young mother in skirt and heels... casually vacuuming... her baby's diapers! And, you'll notice, last century, it was always the lady of the house doing the dirty, hard work of cleaning it.
Other ads of this period show dreamy-eyed housewives (in formal wear!) ogling their vacuum cleaners or wishing that their hubbies would buy them... a labor-saving vacuum cleaner for Christmas. Other ads depict "domesticated" women wearing chiffon evening-gowns (and pointy-toed high heels, of course) ecstatically Hoovering the shag carpet (one-handed, no less!) while the "Man" of the house reclines in his Easy Boy reading the newspaper smoking a pipe. Ha! Where's the old... or rather the young... Mick Jagger when we need to hear from him?
Eventually, I did buy a vacuum. I needed to read the instruction manual on line, study-up, pass a user's test and get a graduation certificate before I could turn the thing on. Soon after it was delivered by UPS, the vendor sent me the usual requests to rate my purchase - "HEY STEVE!!" ... "Hey??" Whatever happened to 'hello?' Am I on a casual, first name basis with some shopping app up in the Cloud?... The app queried me like we were long time frat-brothers:
"Hey Steve! How did that new vacuum cleaner work out for you?!?!"
Well, it sucks, of course.
This one, like nearly every model I checked out, had the usual features: a retractable cord that will smack me in the face as it rewinds, a special tool for 'crevices' (I don't even want to think about that), a super suction device for making small yappy dogs disappear, and, maybe, something for cleaning baby diapers as in the 1950s advert.
It also has various power and noise settings. They range from "low," as in standing right behind the turbojets of a Boeing 737 Max about to take off (or crash); to "mid-range," as in Israeli-American F35 jets bombing apartment buildings in Beirut; to "maximum," as in Space X Heavy Lift launch pad mode. All of which settings could lead to severe injury, I am told, if I don't wear ear protectors, bullet-proof goggles, fire-resistant asbestos pants, a flak jacket and a dust respirator. Or so the manufacturer's lawyers warn in the fine print of the user's manual as they seek to immunize the vendor from even the most remote possibility of personal injury liability.
I didn't consider getting an artificially intelligent vacuum cleaner. Even now, there are some simple models out there for purchase that roll around your house and randomly bump into things just like a small ice hockey Zamboni on psybicillin.
Sam Altman, the 21st Century's carnival barker of high-tech, wants investors (and taxpayers) to fork over $7 trillion for artificial intelligence research and development to solve all of humankind's problems which, presumably, includes cleaning my house. Obviously, anyone who bites on that $7 trillion hook proves the need for artificial intelligence due to a complete absence of the native sort. Next gen robot vacuums (such as what Sam Altman's "Open AI" might sell some day after it fully transforms itself into a for-profit publicly traded corporation) will probably be programmed using Large Language Model neural networks to perform an absolutely abysmal job doing what any partially sentient human being could do reasonably well in half the time at a quarter the cost.
Worse, I cannot imagine what a fully roboticized artificially intelligent vacuum cleaner would do with a "crevice cleaning device" if given free rein.
I was pleased, nonetheless, that none of the vacuum cleaners I saw for sale were Tesla-style "vacuum browsers" - you know, computerized cleaning machine cell phone hybrids with built-in screens and cameras for watching movies, calling your friends, checking the stock markets, posting movies to social media of your 'house-cleaning adventure,' watching pornography or placing professional sports gambling bets, all of which while connected to the Internet of Things via Wi-Fi and recorded somewhere or other 'in the Cloud' such that a record is kept of your every sweep of the floor, your vacuuming time and location, your browsing history, the chemical content of your household dirt, the room temperature, the humidity, your facial expressions, your blood pressure, your DNA and your heartbeat; all of which to be reported in real time to the local (and national) constabulary as well as various marketing silos, saved forever in your digital dossier, all powered by lithium battery packs that are programmed to rapidly discharge and explode if triggered by a back-door radio signal transmitted by Israel's Mossad or some other nation's spooky team of assassins.
See how I slid that in there? It's like Arlo Guthrie's ballad, Alice's Restaurant, which is also a house-keeping song about taking out the garbage after Thanksgiving dinner, but which is really about the Draft, the Vietnam War and how to shut it down.
I have this recurring daydream fantasy when, this year or next, during the ten days of introspection between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), that Mr. Netanyahu and certain especially troglodytic members of his antediluvian cabinet all receive a simultaneous page and a Zoom teleconference invitation from God. But, too late, they realize that God, too, has His/Her/Its/Their own back-and front-door access to their electronic devices (and their biological wetware, too); but their realization comes too late as boiling dark storm clouds form rapidly above their heads and... well, such are retribution daydream fantasies.
Speculation is rampant about how the Israelis managed to simultaneously blow up several thousand pagers and telecommunication devices in Lebanon and Syria. Various news outlets reported on "how it was done," but you can be sure that if you can read about it in The New York Times, then it is mostly BS. Remember: it was The New York Times that brought us Judith Miller and the completely fabricated stories about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction that, inter alia, formed the pretext for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Syria. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Lithium batteries do catch fire and, sometimes, explode. A short-circuited lithium battery can burn very hot and very long. The fire department recommends that all residential Level 2 charging points for electric vehicles be installed outside, not inside your house. Many news stories around the world report on apartment fires ignited by overcharged electric bicycles. Fire departments have developed special fire-fighting protocols for extinguishing electric cars that have caught fire. Were Hezbollah's paging devices also laced with some type of additional C4 plastic explosive? Maybe. But explosives might not have been necessary in the event of a rapid, incendiary discharge of the devices' lithium batteries remotely triggered.
In Lebanon, the war between Israel and Hezbollah is likely being fought both on the basis of electronic and old fashioned human intelligence. More than likely, Israeli agents are deeply infiltrated into Hezbollah right up to the highest command centers, as is most certainly the case with Hamas. Generally speaking, various states' intelligence services have infiltrated (or created) all international and most national/local organizations of any note. As for the current war in the Middle East - which is just one theater of action in the World War that is already well underway - if you take a quick look at Israeli troops, Palestinians, Hezbollah fighters and even Iranian military men, you will notice that... except for their attire... you won't see any consistent differences in phenotypes. They all look pretty much the same.
Because they are pretty much the same. As we all are.
All of which makes the lunacy of creating ethno-national states not only infeasible and irrational, but also one of the dumbest ideas born of the 19th-20th Centuries. The concept of an ethno-national state is equally as idiotic as monarchy, aristocracy and empire.
Technology.
It isn't, and it never was, the domain of pure intellectual inquiry. Even Mr. Galileo, who left his mark in astronomy, physics, and engineering, also contributed his efforts to his patrons' better aiming techniques for cannons and bombards. Galileo, however, did not invent the vacuum cleaner. I guess that, in Galileo's time, 17th Century Italian housewives were still cleaning the house with straw brooms, "una scopa dalla tecnologia innovativa." When I lived in Naples as a kid, decades and decades ago, I don't remember any Italian women getting giddy over brooms or mops or wishing to get an artificially intelligent vacuum cleaner for Christmas.
In Gaza, Israel is using... artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically select targets. This isn't magic, and, for that matter, it also is not accurate. But it provides gee-whiz technological cover for all the women, children and sundry non-combatants killed in the Gaza and Beirut air strikes.
Most, if not all, digital devices, have built in back doors, either in the software, the hardware, or both. That's what Edward Snowden talked about years ago and that's why he fled the United States. After 14 years of unrelenting persecution, Julian Assange was just released from a UK maximum security prison after "pleading guilty to journalism." Mr. Assange has clearly been beaten up, but, against all odds, he has survived. His recent presentation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg is sobering and I encourage people who are even minimally interested in the pursuit of truth and justice to click on the link and listen.
The United States and its vassals have banned Chinese telecommunications gear such as that manufactured by Huawei. The U.S. claims that TikTok is rife with Chinese Communist "back doors."
The problem certainly is not that these these devices and media have nefarious Chinese "back doors." The problem is that they are not CIA/NSA/FBI/MI5-6 back doors.
It is public knowledge that Android and Apple phones all can be tracked even if they are "off." Everything you say, read, email, record, text, click or browse on your digital device is wide open to those with access. It is also public knowledge that your devices can be "turned on" remotely, that is, their microphones and cameras set to record and broadcast without giving any signal or indication that they have been activated. Presumably, using a programmed radio transmission, your own devices' lithium batteries can also be instructed to rapidly and catastrophically discharge.
Similarly, most new cars manufactured and sold in the western world incorporate a variety of "smarts," often marketed as "safety features." Every car sold within the past decade has, for instance, a so-called Event Data Recorder. Like the black box recovered from an airplane crash, the Event Data Recorder collects and preserves a rolling archive of information such as vehicle speed, braking, steering angle, seatbelt use and similar crash significant information. In some vehicles today, a tremendous amount of driver and passenger data is continuously broadcast back to the manufacturer (or the manufacturer's out-sourced contractor) where it is archived. This is how Tesla, for example, can adduce evidence that a crashed EV that ostensibly drove itself into a wall was, in fact, piloted by a drunk, cannabis smoking driver who simply fell asleep at the wheel doing 100 mph.
Modern cars also include, among other things, multiple exterior and interior cameras and cabin microphones, ostensibly to monitor what's going on outside as well as inside. So, yes, when you get into today's automobile, you are on Candid Camera! Keep that in mind before you do what you do in the supposed privacy of your car, including calling your spouse, talking with a passenger, cursing some politician, passing gas, belching, scratching yourself or picking your nose.
In addition, modern cars automatically track where you are, your starting point and your destination, and what you look at as you drive by. Based on an analysis of that information, the data processors can determine your likes and dislikes, and even guess at your sexual preferences. Today's automobiles are routinely and constantly collecting and transmitting data to any number of data silos.
Ford Motor Company has applied to patent a system by which automobile occupants' speech and images would be collected and transmitted to a central facility where they could be subject to predictive analysis and 'targeted advertising.' Or other kinds of ‘targeting,’ as the case might be.
Modern vehicles also can be disabled by a remote signal or even operated from the outside, just like the toy radio controlled vehicles the kids play with. If the advertisers can track you and me, and if the advertisers can predictably analyze who is in a vehicle, where it is going and what the occupants are doing, then there is no doubt that anyone inside that vehicle (and at its destination) can also be targeted with a missile or a suicide drone. Or, that vehicle can be remotely captured, its internal controls disabled, the doors locked and the vehicle and its passengers caused to drive into a cement wall at 100 mph.
“Hurrah for our side!” you might say.
But don't cheer for "our side." Our side never includes the likes of me... or you; and, if it does, then not for long or forever. Whoever can track, surveil and maim some target in Beirut or Gaza can, one day, in the same way, also track, surveil and maim me... or you. Intentionally or accidentally, maliciously or even on a whim as a dark prank.
I sat down next to my new vacuum cleaner to have an honest conversation about what it was up to. Fortunately, it lacked the smarts to talk... or to listen... to me. End of "conversation." Or, is it smart enough not to let me know what it knows?
Hmm.
I don't think I will ever again use a vacuum cleaner... or any other of the many modern digital devices operating in and around my life... without a nagging, suspicious, distrustful paranoia.
We are enmeshed in a high tech world war.
What have we wrought?
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