Making sense of a new home gadget

We’ve bought a Google Home Hub for the house. Now I ought to admit that it hadn’t been something that had insinuated itself into my thought processes up until now, but as a means of organising our lives, and being generally useful, I’m beginning to see some advantages.

Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of a bureaucrat-made cup of tea will know that, having gone to the trouble of boiling water in a kettle and pouring it over a teabag pre-placed in a mug, I am perfectly capable of then forgetting all about it. This is, especially for people who were quite keen on having me make them a cup of tea, quite annoying. Now, having successfully completed the first two elements of the task, the Home Hub can be instructed to remind me to complete the project.

I can also instruct it to play walrus videos on demand, or tunes I enjoy, or advise as to whether or not I need an umbrella, or a coat.

That all sounds a bit, well, inadequate, but Ros can leave me reminders to do things, we can coordinate diaries, and it will give me up to date news, train delay information, simply by shouting at it. It is, I imagine, a bit like having a personal assistant, not that I’ve ever had one of those...

It could be easy to find all of this a bit, well, banal, but it is a reminder of how technology has changed our lives. Information is now readily at hand without the need for a vast library, and I don’t have to lift a finger to access it. It will, I guess, do all sorts of things if I learn how, and potentially make my life a little easier, leaving me with more time for leisure. And that’s a good thing, right?

It was always suggested that, as technology developed greater and greater ability to carry out tasks previously done by humans, we would become less and less necessary for production, with the mundane stuff being done by robots and computers. That hasn’t yet come to pass, and even were it to do so, we would have to make the psychological adjustment to not being defined by our job in the same way that some of us currently are.

As jobs that require physical labour slowly disappear, we have adapted to a society where more and more people provide services to each other. Everything from personal shoppers to accountants, few of which are entirely necessary, but who by helping us to do things we’d rather not do ourselves, free us up to do more enjoyable things in exchange for a fee.

I admit that I’ve been a bit slow to adapt to this. Perhaps it is a mark of my upbringing that I hesitate to spend money on something that is a bit of a ‘frippery’, when it could be saved or invested. But in an increasingly complex world, paying someone to do something properly, far more quickly and efficiently than I could do it, makes sense. I can also obtain pleasure by being pampered a little - not too often mind, for my slightly Catholic sense of guilt acts as a restraint.

And so, little by little, technology plays a bigger role in our lives, both at work and in our leisure time. It’s almost certainly a good thing, as long as we remember what the potential costs are.