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I don’t think I have the slightest idea why the 6.2 litres Top Load washing machine is even called semi-automatic if it’s so heavily dependent on my intelligence. A recent project got me trying to cover the point of view of a bike rider. After numerous attempts to do it with action cameras, we found solace in a smart home cloud camera, which is really a very tiny hidden camera mounted in the chin of a helmet. The camera is about the size of my nail. Remarkably the first day of operating these two contrasting devices happened to be today. The last four hours are probably the most I have been harassed by technology than any time in my entire life, and I am a millennial!
We millennials have been through all speeds of the Internet, all sizes of digital memories, all pixels of cameras and most probably each and every one of the manuals that came with these machines. I remember my grandmother’s place and probably even my childhood home having a washing machine similar to this. This must be the early 90s and a washing machine was a more expensive phenomenon than a helper being paid to thrash clothes with a small bat on a rough rock to clean out the dirt. I also vaguely remember the washing machine being so big and noisy that it had to be kept in the basement or in the subtle balcony. We were not allowed to operate the knobs, but it was ok to make us kids shift the heavy wet clothes from the washer to the dryer. It left a faint nostalgia of childhood when the room started smelling of fresh detergent foam.
In the same moment, it made me remember all the women standing behind my back explaining to me how to use the machine. There was some memory in the back of my head, but learning how to use different machines at different times means nothing and is of no use in 2023. I thought of my mother, who was fascinated by machines and would love to understand how they worked by herself. She taught me to read the right signs to make the right things work. It was the lack of ‘pause’ or ‘stop’ signs that confused me today. She probably even got as confused and tired as me when we got our first machine. ‘She probably had only the printed manual with a seriously tiny print,’ I wondered, as I googled for a ‘pdf manual of Semi Automatic Top Load Machines’!
On the other end of the room was a brand new motorbike helmet with a tinted mirror shiny vizor, and a hidden device that worked on the cloud with the Internet. My whole life I was under the misconception that the Internet was there to make things simpler or faster. Today it was neither. There was no manual for the camera, online or offline and I had to write WhatsApp messages to the seller sitting in a spy camera shop in Kolkata to learn how to turn it on. Space and time are no match to what problems connecting three phones to a helmet can cause. We think of a world where everything is IOT, everything works in harmony with each other and makes life convenient, fast, and intelligent for humans. We imagine a future which can be controlled by AI and machine learning that can use the information to rain comfort and satisfaction to humans. Yet, today, as I held three smartphones, a laptop and a smart camera these machines just felt dumb.
My marriage is easier than connecting smart devices or operating a semi-automatic washing machine. The comparison is fair because neither came with a manual to me and I had less than a minute to figure it out once I had decided to enter. Unlike Sanket, the most beautiful husband a woman could have, the washing machine didn’t know how to save my clothes from drowning. Unlike Sanket, the camera showed me no signs of connection to either the Internet, the phone, the wifi or just to itself! In four hours, I filled the washer twice, drained it about six times, dried my clothes twice and apparently rinsed them only once. During the same time, I connected the helmet to my phone, then my other phone, then the hotspot on both phones, then to the camera app on both phones consecutively, then to my friend’s phone’s app, and then the friend’s phone’s hotspot. It was more connected than the electrons in my brain, yet, the camera wouldn’t show me a picture. That’s a paradoxical tragedy.
Cameras were invented in the 18th century and live projection was even before the 16th century. Eventually, we got both into a phone during the 20th century. Still, in the last 400 years that we took to combine these three technologies, we didn’t think once about how easy it should be to set it up. That’s the problem with the human mind. We think in terms of conclusion but never in terms of initiation. What impact that semi-automatic machine would do on a 30-year-old working mother or on a 50-year-old working grandmother wasn’t the thought that crossed someone’s mind. After all, struggling with a washing machine that was supposed to make my ”life good”, doesn’t boost my faith in its makers. It only considered that the job of a 20-something helper woman needed to be eliminated. For generations, mankind has struggled with differentiating between what to leave in the past and what to carry forward to the next generation. Today was an ultimate example that showed we still haven’t figured it out and I am still left having to use the same washing machine.
Nevertheless, the four hours of analysing and electronic communications led me to record a 1-minute test video on the cloud camera inside the helmet and it allowed me to learn a valuable lesson about wasting precious resources out of negligence. I eventually understood that, unlike people, machines need to be constantly guided, commanded and programmed to act in the way that they favour us and regardless of all, we might still regret it.
And with the growing demand for AI and the lack of infrastructural capacity, would it, in the immediate future, be an aid to human development or increase technological anxiety for those of us living in developing countries?
When I realised the toolness a tool, I realised the coolness of the cools! Here’s to the people who deserve more, and to machines who deserve less!