Unless you’ve been living in a very remote place, with no news, no internet and almost no human contact of any kind, you’ll have heard of AI, artificial intelligence as, in 2023/24, it’s been absolutely everywhere.
But breath… it’s okay, we’re not about to tell you how the world is going to upend itself, how our stuff is about to get way smarter or any of that claptrap, we’re going to (as usual) bust a few myths and probably some people’s bubbles in the process.
Oh, and AI **DID NOT** write this article!!
What’s That Rumbling, A Gravy Train…
Pretend for a moment that you’re a marketer working for a big corporation we know, some people might not want to, but run with it for us please.
You’re sat in your office staring at the current marketing trends, keywords, Google searches, news feeds and all the various bits of information that informs what you do and… BOOM!!
What’s that, all of a sudden all this talk of AI is all over the news and, not just the tech news but the actual news that ordinary non-geek people consume. Everyone and their dog is on it, famous investors, Elon Musk is having kittens about it, Apple are getting in on the act, Google are all over it and on and on it goes. It’s a deluge of stuff that’s everywhere.
Now, it’s possible the first thought will be, if my boss doesn’t think the team are all over this, we’re getting fired in the morning.
Ah but you’re a smart marketer, you see the trend here and you think to yourself, “How can we get on in on this, make search love us, cream it off the whole AI thing?”
Then you remember, you make plant pots. And AI plant pot, how do we come up with that one?
Yeah, we’re being glib, flippant and a tad irreverent (again!) but you get the idea. From plant pots to cars, to appliances to just about anything marketers are going to try to, somehow, shoehorn their way and the products they are marketing into the trend to ride the wave of popularity.
You can’t blame them, it’s what they do and what they are paid to do.
However, we fundamentally have “issues” with some of the often disingenuous ways they do it.
So we end up with AI in rice cookers, speakers, bulbs, appliances, cars… goodness know what all even when, really, it’s not AI at all.
It’s just a sticker on a device to make you think it’s smarter than it really is.
Smart Pot!
But then our mythical marketer thinks, “oh but we do that smart plant pot, the wifi connected one…”
A few design sketches later and it’s now the “Smart Pot 2.0 with AI”.
What changed? Nothing.
Well, asides from putting AI on it as who’s going to challenge it or say anything about it? But now it can ride the gravy train of search etc with it’s proud AI badge of honour.
Side Bar: You Could Argue…
This article is an attempt to cash in on the AI thing, and maybe there’s a sliver of truth to that just so we’re being completely honest and transparent here. But more, we see all this “stuff” having so-called “AI” inside, and we know that it’s absolute cobblers.
We just worry about how many people get suckered by it.
Anyways, onward…
Encouraging Laziness
No, not the lazy marketing, if most marketers had a conscience about this sorta stuff we’d leave them to their own devices. We’re talking about making people lazy.
You see there are people out there in the world (some of whom members have likely visited, often more then once) who don’t read instructions. Even when instructed, don’t follow them. And there are the people that just do utterly crazy stuff.
We can say, with a good degree of certainty that there are people who will assume, because it’s what they want to believe, that the “magic machine with AI in it” will work it all out for them, so they don’t have to.
Believe us, those people are out there.
They are the type of person that thinks that the spiffing new fancy oven with AI built in and a gazzilion recipes from ChatGPT is beyond wonderful. They just tell it they want fresh scones, through all the ingredients in a tin, shove it in the oven and out comes scones to rival the best of The Great British Bake Off.
Sadly, when expectations meet reality, that ain’t what’s gonna happen.
Next, service gets a call declaring that “the oven doesn’t work, it won’t bake scones”.
Yes, we may be (maybe, but maybe not) pushing the example to a bit of an extreme but we hope you can understand that a more honest approach to how these things are sold just might be a better idea.
One Problem With AI Appliances
Here’s the thing of it, appliances are, at least in terms of the tasks that they perform, really rather simple and haven’t changed all that much in, oh, fifty years or more.
They wash stuff, cook stuff, dry stuff and keep stuff fresh. It’s not rocket science really.
Sure, getting them to perform well, consistently and so that’s harder but the basic functionality, not all that hard. Especially when you don’t care about performance.
The need for AI in a refrigeration product is, well, perplexing but let’s just look at the one you’re liable to see “AI” badges on soon enough, if not already, the washing machine.
Consider this to wash a load of clothes you need to:
- Sort the load: colour/white/delicates etc
- Select the correct detergent for the load and put that in the machine
- Select the correct program/temperature for the load
- Put the load in the machine
- Start it
Can you spot the bits that the supposed “AI” in the machine cannot address?
That’s right. For many of the tasks that need to be done, you really need one of two things: human interaction (and decision-making) or robotics. No amount of “AI” is going to solve those physical problems.
That might give us all sorts of other stuff to worry about, some too much to bear thinking about for many people we expect.
Okay, all joking aside, can you see how AI doesn’t really help and even when some marketing bumph says a machine has “AI” in I and is using it that what it could do, if anything at all, would be severely limited?
Kitchen appliances just don’t need it, they don’t need to be able to figure out a lot at all asides from what to do based on what you put in them and your intended outcome.
A Flight Of Fancy
Let’s for a moment imagine that you’r sold on all this AI stuff and you reckon that it’ll do a fantastic job.
In order to try to work in our washing machine example you need to design something that can recognise the products going into it (via labels or whatever), be able to weigh the amount of clothing, then determine the detergent dose required which also means being able to recognise the soil level on the items then set it all up and start the best program to use.
So in there, we have goodness knows how many sensors, optical, weight and so on all of which are potential points of failure but they are also costs. It’d be expensive.
It’s not beyond the wit of man we’re sure but, would anyone pay for it or want it?
And, you’d still need a robot to fully automate it.
Claimed Intelligence
We hope that from the above and, the point of it was so you can understand why that a brand slapping an “AI” on a machine doesn’t make it smart or, any smarter than any other. Unless of course they’ve spent millions on R&D, added a shedload of sensors and so on to kinda, sorta justify the claim.
But even then, in our opinion, it’s probably a bit flaky at best.
Some people will believe it though, almost for sure, that there are some sort of mystical AI properties blessed by Elon Musk or whatever lurking inside their machine making it smarter than the average machine.
And those that believe it, may well choose that machine over another, pay more for it or from the marketers perspective as a right result, both.
When it comes down to it, the most intelligent thing you can do (see what we did there!) is to approach these claims with complete disbelief and work forward from there.
For now “AI” is just the latest rebrand of “smart appliances” or “fuzzy logic”, it’s nothing new.
If you want more laughs, wath thi s video as it’s funny and absolutely on the nail:
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Does AI Have a Place?
In the appliance industry, we definitely reckon it does. Just probably not how people might imagine.
It’s all too likely that in time we will see AI being used in appliance design although, given how well that’s all been going up until now we harbour doubts on how well it’ll pan out, at least for the time being.
We’re still at the start of the AI revolution and it’s a developing “thing” that is evolving, albeit quite quickly it appears.
But mostly our take is its more about machine learning than actual AI but for most people to grasp it’s just easier to tell them it’s AI, they get that. Trying to explain machine learning to a lot of people is an uphill battle at times and the lines can probably get a bit blurry.
We’re not even saying we understand it all, we all fix and sell parts for kitchen appliances, we’re not computer scientists!
But, we’re smart enough to see some the possibilities in machine learning and AI and how it could be used, especially in the service and spare parts world and yes, it could make an impact, even perhaps be revolutionary. But that is a story for another time.