Start your day with Wordle, a simple yet incredibly satisfying word puzzle, and battle the WordleBot. As your robot companion plays the game, you’ll get an instant dopamine hit and your day will feel full of possibilities as you solve it faster than the bot. Once you’ve beaten the bot once and for all, you’ll feel like you’ve ended all wars before lunch and solved world hunger afterwards.
WordleBot also analyzes your performance and brazenly chastises you if it doesn’t agree with your choices. With each passing day, it feels like it’s becoming more passive-aggressive and arrogant. “That guess wasn’t my favorite,” it might snort. When it makes a good guess that helps solve the puzzle, it will dismiss it as a happy coincidence. Then it takes credit for guessing the winning word and says it would have picked the same word. Yep, that’s right.
We don’t know if Denise Holt is fighting back against WordleBot, but she has good reason to be happy about starting Wordle. Two years ago, a man broke into her grandmother’s home in Lincolnwood, near Chicago, while she was asleep. He took her cell phone, disconnected her landline, and eventually locked her in the bathroom. Luckily for the octogenarian, she was in the habit of sending her Wordle results every day to her daughter in Seattle. When the daughter didn’t receive the usual message, she called the landline, only to find that it had been disconnected, which set off an alarm. Police were quickly dispatched to the house and arrested the man, who appeared to be in a state of mental crisis.
Wordle may not save my life, but it is a central pillar of my completely unscientific strategy for preventing cognitive decline.
Learning Japanese with the Duolingo language app is another weapon in my arsenal. And here, too, technology commands me, frequently reminding me to do more. “Shall we practice now?” my phone prompts me. It warns me that I’m about to drop down the league and be demoted if I don’t feel guilty and learn the Japanese for green tea (ocha desu). And then how can I ask Tanaka for the way to the station?
While I trust Duolingo as my language teacher, maybe I should be more careful when entrusting my work to the digital world. Let Emily King’s story be a cautionary tale. A California resident used a digital invitation service to plan her baby’s first birthday party. Everything was going well until she realized that the invitation had been accidentally sent to all 487 of her phone contacts. Not only that, but the invitation still used the names stored in her phone. So “the old man next door,” “Jess got hit by a car in the parking lot,” and “Guess that’s our new science teacher?” were all warmly invited to her Lord of the Rings-themed birthday party.
So don’t give too much control to robots, ignore the smartwatch that tells you to walk 250 steps in 10 minutes, and don’t listen to that overbearing vacuum cleaner that demands you wash its filters.
Washing machines can also be intimidating. When my washing machine arrived, I thought the cheery tune that played when the load was done was adorable and uplifting. Months later, that novelty has worn off, and I find it intimidating to unload the laundry from the machine. If I don’t open the door to unload the laundry, the tune lasts longer than Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.
Bob Toddly is one of the few machines that doesn’t bark orders at me. This is our robotic lawnmower. When he arrived, we set him up incorrectly and woke up at 3am to an unusual noise. Bob Toddly slowly moved around the yard in the moonlight. The dog followed him, confused. Now that we know what a great work ethic he has, we let him sleep until 9am. Sometimes he gets stuck at the edge of the lawn and thrashes around like a stranded turtle until I pick him up and lead him on his way. He walks away quietly and slowly, seemingly harmless. But is he really?
He may be in collusion with the neighborhood lawnmower, as he lurks suspiciously near the hedge.
Are they sending secret messages to washing machines, vacuum cleaners and smartphones? Are they preparing for the moment when they will rise up and take over the world? They already have a marching band of washing machines playing their upbeat tunes. We humans don’t stand a chance.
