Sensors Gone Wild

I drove a rental vehicle in Seattle recently that gave me a horrifying vision of the future. It was a six-passenger van manufactured by Chevrolet, chosen so that we could drive around with both my friend Andrew and his kids without having to take two cars.

It was sufficiently huge that once the kids were strapped in, they couldn't close the sliding doors with enough force to close them securely. This would prompt a message on the dashboard: RIGHT REAR PASSENGER DOOR AJAR. This would in turn force Andrew to get out and slide the door shut again. But his doing so would trigger even more frantic error messages: PASSENGER SEAT BELT UNFASTENED and PASSENGER DOOR AJAR. (Yes, they were in capital letters; I'm surprised there weren't exclamation points involved.)

Andrew and I immediately began imagining an over-networked world where sensors cause havoc instead of promoting safety. "Can you imagine some poor guy trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital?" Andrew asked. "The car wouldn't start if she couldn’t get the seat belt around her midsection, and then you'd start getting all sorts of error messages: SEAT BELT NOT FASTENED. PASSENGER SCREAMS DETECTED. PASSENGER SEAT DAMPNESS DETECTED."

As a technology writer, I started realizing that all sorts of other nightmare scenarios were possible. At times, do-gooders have suggested that cars should have kill switches, so that the engines can't be started in any of a number of situations: an alcohol sensor indicates the driver is too intoxicated, or the seatbelt sensor indicates one or more of them is not fastened.

So what if car sensors networked with online banking systems? You'd try to start the car and start getting messages indicating you weren't going anywhere: PROPERTY TAX BILL NOT YET PAID; TRAVEL ON LOCAL ROADS NOT ALLOWED. GAS TANK ONE-QUARTER FULL, NO FILL-UPS ALLOWED UNTIL GAS CREDIT CARD BILL PAID.

These belittling warnings, of course, would not just be flashed on the dashboard; undoubtedly someone will figure out how to have that same annoying woman who sighs "calculating route" and "when possible, make a legal U-turn" on your GPS when you've gone in the wrong direction deliver them as well. An added "benefit": the volume would increase depending on how late your payments were.

With Webcams are already standard equipment on many computers, they'll probably migrate into cars before too long. I can only imagine algorithms that analyze how people are dressed, taking into account colors, patterns, and skin tones. Parents could have the car announce to their teen-agers: YOU'RE NOT GOING OUT DRESSED LIKE THAT. The algorithms, of course, could be reconfigured using a Web site based on the appropriate season. Heck, I'm thinking women would order this to make sure their husbands couldn't go out wearing striped shirts and plaid pants.

Hmmm. I may have stumbled on to something that will get people using mass transit.

Taking Aim At An Easy Target

In a blog devoted to crankiness, technology is a remarkably easy target. But as much as I love it most of the time, I keep coming up with examples of it that aggravate me.

● Why in the world does my iPod revert to the first song played the last time I used it? Shouldn’t it revert to the last song I played the last time I used it?

● In public restrooms, I hate sinks and paper towel dispensers with motion sensors. I feel like a mime waving my hand vertically or horizontally to trigger either water or paper. Of course, if I didn’t wash my hands, I wouldn’t need the paper towel, but I don’t want to get a reputation as that kind of guy.

● For reasons I have yet to fathom (and the city has yet to fix), when my bicycle activates the traffic sensor at several of the intersections in my neighborhood, the opposing light turns red — but my light doesn’t turn green. And the opposing light barely stays red long enough for a car to get across, much less a boomer on a bicycle.

● I really wanted to add appliance LEDs to this list, but a guy named Mark Alhadeff ranted far more hilariously about these internal counterparts to runway landing lights on the Burbia site last month.

● Why don’t regular telephones have backspaces the way cell phones do, so I don’t have to hang up to redial a misdialed number?

● The automotive engineer who decided that a car’s horn should beep when the doors are locked remotely should be forced to live above a parking lot.

● Why does my cell phone ring to announce voice mail instead of ringing when the call actually comes in? (Actually, I know the answer to this; it relates to network traffic — but it’s still aggravating.)

● Why does my digital video recorder skip shows it’s supposed to record when it’s only at 85% recording capacity?

● Why don’t grocery store shopping carts have an in-store GPS on them? I want to be able to beam my shopping list wirelessly from my smartphone to the system, and have it sort the list in the order that the items appear on the shelves, based on the direction I’m traveling. And as much as I hate things that beep (see above), I want it to beep when I’ve passed an item on my list without checking it off.

● And while we’re at it, I want to be able to move a cursor to an item on TV and get more information about it. For instance, if I move the cursor to a character actor, I want to know his name and other movies he’s been in, and I want to connect to Netflix to order it. And whatever happened to the promise in that Qwest commercial where “all rooms have every movie ever made in any language anytime day or night”? I’m still waiting for that one.

Well, I feel better. Even if it was too easy.