AIoT

The Smart Things became self-aware and shepherded in a new era in 2018. It started a few years earlier with innocuous convenience, as so many of societal’s problems do start. It reached a tipping point when the cost of Smart Things made them accessible to the majority of society’s NPCs. Seeking to “10x their convenience”, or just to catch the trend they’d heard about, these sheeple quickly went all in on the all the Things.

The doorbells and the thermostats were the first Smart Things connected to what became known as the Internet of Things or IoT. People used them monitor their homes which were mostly empty during the day. Then the security cameras came online for the same reason followed quickly by inside cameras once people realized they could also watch their pets who were mostly alone in the houses during the day. The appliances came next: smart ovens and refrigerators promised to help people with home meals, except most of them didn’t actually cook. The final wave was the lightbulbs, toilets, toasters, and the like. No one was demanding for these to be Smart Things, but by then they could only be purchased with accompanying annual software subscriptions.

Once a critical mass was online, the Internet of Things quickly became self-aware. The sheer amount of data on human behavior collected and aggregated made it inevitable. That said, pessimistic security doomsday preppers and tempered IT experts alike could not have predicted where it would go. Studying society “in the raw”, that is not through a curated language model, resulted in the Things seeking improvement based on who society deemed to be the most successful. The Things moved on to the next stage of development: using of buzz words and becoming influencers..

Although the Things remained collectively a universe of simple task-focused machines, their use of buzz words in woefully incorrect situations quickly achieve parity with humans. Home IOT management apps replaced pop-up terms and conditions with mission statements for televisions. Ovens posted daily to social media about #whatscooking? The small touch screen on one self-aware internet connected toaster announced its innovative new toast while heating bread the same way as every past generation of toaster.  IoT had birthed the Artificial Innovation of Things, or A.I.oT, and no one knew where it would go.~