Apparently Samsung is putting ‘AI’ (and ads) in fridges. I am certainly not opposed to innovation and think that a lot of technologies that haven’t changed much for a long time have room for improvement (if you grew up in the US or Europe, try using a Japanese toilet and you’ll understand). But the frustrating thing is that there are a lot of useful things that a fridge could do with some computing power and a bit of electrical control that they don’t and which don’t need ‘AI’. Some examples:

• It could talk to a smart meter to run the compressor when electricity is cheap and keep a reservoir of chilled coolant for when electricity is expensive.
• It could automatically close the door if I leave it open for more than a minute and don’t first put it into ‘I am cleaning the fridge now’ mode.
• It could record (with bar code or image recognition - the latter of which you could even market as ‘AI’ because apparently computer vision is ‘AI’ now) when I open things like milk or juice so when a thing says ‘consume writhing 5 days of opening’ and I can’t remember when I opened it, it can tell me.
• It could then warn me if I’ve left something that will spoil in the fridge.
• It could track when I remove / replace things so ‘are we nearly out of X’ is a question I can answer from my phone / tablet / laptop when organising a food order, without having to go and check.

All of these are features I would actually find useful. The last ones require a bit of clever computer vision and good UI design, the earlier ones are just applications of mature technology.

And I would actually pay more for these features (and the first one would likely save me more money over the lifetime of the fridge than the price delta, so everyone wins [except oil companies, but that is a feature in itself]).

I could write a similar rant about pretty much every piece of electrical equipment I own. All of these have a load of trivial improvements that could be made if you start by asking the question ‘how do people use this and how do we improve it?’ Rather than ‘how do we add {an app,AI,this week’s buzzword} that marketing wants in the next generation?’