My son and I were having a telephone conversation today and he mentioned that he had to do a firmware update on his cats’ litter box but that it wasn’t that difficult because it is connected to wi-fi. We also discussed the name he assigned it on the manufacturer’s server. Apparently, it is a pretty fancy litter box as it is only illuminated at night when a cat is nearby and can tell if your cats are gaining or losing weight.
Without getting sidetracked into a political discussion the most obvious example is the current American political situation. Without the slightest bit of hyperbole, everyday there are news stories about Trump and his MAGAts that if you’d included in a story about a fictional terrible president 20 years ago you have been told to dial it back. A single actually factual description of something Trump did or said would have caused your editor to be like “let’s keep it realistic here, no one is going to believe this is anything other than a one dimensional ‘bad president’ caricature”
So this always bugged me about “the internet of things”, we went straight from proprietary “dumb” devices where I couldn’t control the internal operation but they would work, to propriatary “smart” devices where I couldn’t control the internal operation, but would not work if the firmware needed upgrading or the company when bust, and would sell my data to the highest bidder.
At no point was there the middle ground of a “smart” litter box that I could hack around with and see if my cat likes it if I play 90s electronica and sweep the litter in the form of the mandlebrot set.
This is what I came here to say, too.
20 or 30 years ago, the notion that you would see an online Twitter/X statement that reads in the following style: “The TRAITOROUS and DISGUSTING pigs and PIECES of SHIT in the LOSER DEMOCRATIC PARTY are TRYING THEIR BEST to DESTROY MY GLORIOUS PRESIDENCY, BUT I WILL HAVE THE LAST LAUGH” and have to do serious fact-checking to see if it was, in fact, something that the President of the United States had said that morning or not, would be unbelievable. Nobody would believe for one moment that Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. would say something remotely of that sort.
Trump did not say that; that was something I typed. But it’s in the style of Trump’s tweeting/X-posting.
Who knew I’d be asking my 6 y/o granddaughter how to do something on her tablet? Yeah, I could have figured it out, but it was quicker and easier to have Roxy do it. I’m such a geezer!!
Or telling both of my grandkids that they can’t swipe on every screen they see. Seeing that little finger reaching out to the credit card screen where I would tap my card because she or he wanted to do whatever they thought the screen did…
Trump doesn’t laugh. C-minus.
Sardonic laugh maybe?
I just want to second this. A manuscript for a novel that depicted this exact situation would have been rejected by every publisher as ridiculously outrageous and obviously impossible.
Anyway, my contribution here is the bleeding obvious. I don’t think we would have seriously believed in the sudden dramatic advances in AI, where in 2024 the debates about AI are staged against a background of astounding artificial intellectual competence, and fears about these capabilities being used for nefarious purposes.
And on a much more mundane level, twenty or thirty years ago we probably would not have considered that the fix to our car’s dashboard lights not coming on was to reboot the car’s computer.
ALSO IT WOULD BE IN ALL CAPS AND SOMETHING WOULD BE MISPELD.
Ok, extra sentence so it will let me post. Hmm, that sentence itself is hard to believe…
You mean … Trump was lying ?!
My wife and I are getting too old to live at elevation 
Wife: “Why haven’t you left on your trip yet?”
Me: “My phone said it can’t connect to the car.”
“When was the garbage taken out last?”
“Oh just yesterday, September 28, 2024.”
“When did that get dropped off?”
“Let me check my phone. The doorbell says yesterday.”
“Let’s go get a movie at the video store.”
“At the what?”
Fifty years ago I wouldn’t have known what a video store was.
Twenty-five years ago I would have been shocked that somebody didn’t know what a video store was.
Today many people wouldn’t know what a video store is.
I was telling a young coworker about my son’s wireless litterbox and it just seemed normal to her. She then said that reminded her she needed to check her cat’s litterbox and pulled out her phone.
I feel old now.
I’ll talk to my AI and ask her to reply to my emails, write a paper on [?], create a photo or video of [?], write a song about [?], etc.
It would have been difficult to imagine cannabis being openly discussed in the way it is now 30 years ago. Retail sales and stores, researched, prescribed, candies and foodsafe environment maintained, stock prices (not USA yet), all under the taxful eye of a bunch of State governments.
“Son, can you help me set up my new smart TV?” I’m fairly well able to a lot of tech things, but my last TV was basically a ‘point and shoot’ set. Plug it in, turn it on. . .done! This one has a ton of options, most of which I have no idea what they are supposed to do.
Since the war against Ukraine started I’ve participated in and read conversations about corruption and incompetence in Russia and the Russian military that would have been laughed at even a few years ago. And would have been mocked if appearing in fictional form as well.
As a funny side effect I’ve seen a lot less use of the argument “nobody would be that corrupt or incompetent” in criticism of fiction.