I had a note in my inbox this week from my dear little Schnauzer mate, Rosie from Rushworth:

Dear General

I am troubled (more than usual) about the strange behaviours of MY boss — now he’s taken to wandering around the house with tiny white posts stuck in his ears, talking to himself. He does it when he’s driving me around town, too, and when he heads into the supermarket. Should I be barking furiously whenever he does it — to stop him going mad?

Rosie,

Rushworth

Dear Rosie

Nice to hear from you. You are correct to be concerned. These things are his new AirPods and are another way to get humans to spend money on gadgets that make life easier, give them pleasure and take them away from us. He might be going mad — but it isn’t the AirPods doing it.

He might be listening to music, an audio book, a podcast or even the radio — and when he’s talking, it means he’s on the phone to someone. It saves him carrying his mobile and holding it to his ear, so he can be hands-free.

You might think this is a good thing, and clearly, your boss does. But it’s yet another gadget that humans haven’t worked out how to use properly — one they have become so besotted with that they haven’t thought about us, or other humans for that matter. Their manners haven’t caught up.

As you know, for some years we’ve had to dodge humans walking down the street who are looking at their phones rather than where they are going. Being a danger to themselves — walking into power poles or traffic light poles or seats and bollards in the mall is one thing, but stressing out a dog minding its own business is another. We hounds don’t run into anything — unless it’s deliberate.

A lot of humans still look at their phones while they are driving, which gets them into trouble when they’re caught. There’s more of those moveable cameras around now to catch them in the act. So the AirPods can keep them talking and distracted without being caught.

The more alarming thing is that humans have stopped worrying about the people and dogs around them — they talk more loudly with their AirPods in their ears anyway, but they also yell because the AirPods don’t pick up their voices like the phone does.

So there’s this constant stream of personal conversation being visited on the rest of us — in the street, in shops and the supermarket, in the doctor’s waiting room, the bank, at the football and on the train.

It has now become normal, more or less acceptable behaviour, and there is no telling where it will stop.

The Boss says it will reach a whole new level of disconnectedness with the smart glasses coming on to the market, such as the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. He saw some demonstrated the other day. These things combine the stylish Ray-Ban look with Meta’s artificial intelligence technology. They have a tiny camera up in one corner and combine them with open-air headphones behind the ears, which means the human wearing them can make calls, listen to music and interact with artificial intelligence for all sorts of tasks.

Then there are these Lucyd glasses that give access to Chat GPT, so people can ask questions and retrieve information, whereas the Solo AirGo Vision glasses use Chat GPT’s image recognition feature, so the human can recognise people and objects and see information about what they’re looking at, and even have directions provided based on visible landmarks.

The Boss reckons smart glasses will eventually replace the smart phone altogether, let alone the AirPods, so we’ll have a world of distraction where humans are chatting to someone else, looking at you but seeing all this other stuff about you — they’ll know you’re a Schnauzer straight away, roughly how much you cost and what your breed is good for and the health risks you face.

Whether that makes them any more fun to be with remains to be seen. Woof!

The General

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Wednesday, 17th July 2024

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