There are a lot of dumb ideas out there. Most of them thought up by techies. One of them is that you can make new friends by sitting alone in your room staring at a screen. Another one (really big in India): convert people into unique numbers, forget that those numbers are actually people, and then tell the people who are not yet numbers that they won’t be treated as people unless they become numbers.
But the dumbest of all is whoever woke up one day and said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could have conversations with inanimate objects?” No. It would not be. I’m told tech wizards are nerds with zero social skills. But that’s still no excuse for wanting to invent gadgets that talk. Even I don’t have great social skills — ask any of my colleagues, they’ll tell you. But I’ve never felt like talking to my refrigerator. Maybe, some people feel less lonely if they have a toaster to talk to. But most of these devices have no sense of when to open their mouth and when to shut it. And yet, ‘voices’ pop up in just about anything you buy these days.
