Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/21/internet-of-bricks.html
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Hot Patch Taco Tuesday. You can’t run…
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I hope everyone brings them back for a refund. Why is Boing Boing spreading the idea of the consumer being burned? Nike should be getting burnt on this.
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“App won’t pair with left shoe” is not the cyberpunk dystopia I was promised…
But it’ll do.
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If their smart shoes are anything like their regular shoes, they’re screwed
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Smart Shoes Are For Dummies
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That isn’t quite how they work. The heel sensor activates when you step into the shoe—the shoes are still self-tying without the app. The app allows adjustments from your phone and the ability to change the color of the lights on the shoes, but it’s not what makes the shoes self-tying.
Now the Duke thing? That is a hot topic over here this morning…
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And leave myself vulnerable to hackers tying my shoelaces together? No thank you. I got enough of that in grade school.
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Sorry, tea kettle’s rebooting, it’ll be a hot minute. Oh shoot, kettle app just crashed. Tea’s canceled for now, maybe tomorrow, ey?
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that soul sticking out looks like a dog’s tongue trying to get some air…
amazing
Me, too! But that’s the beauty part—since the laces are just wrapped around each shoe, they CAN’T be tied together! Joke’s on them!
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Woahhh, seriously “self-tying shoes”?
This is like the ad for Gibson’s self-tuning guitar “I’ve been playing for 20 years and I could just never tune my guitar right”-- clearly there’s something wrong with this picture.
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I am not in design at Nike, but my understanding is there are two primary use cases. One is sports, where shoes that can adjust and maintain the lace tension while playing are beneficial.
More importantly, there are a lot of potential benefits and self-tying shoes open up footwear options for people with reduced mobility in their fingers and hands.
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Valid points. I can see the value in those cases, but part of me still thinks too much automation is unnecessary, even detrimental in the long run.
Sometimes, I think it’s cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once bought a pair of shoes with Artificial Intelligence. ‘Smart Shoes’ they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they could always get you home. But he got rattled one night in Oslo and woke up the next morning in Burma.
You see, his shoes got bored going from his local to his flat. They wanted to see the world, you know. He had a hell of a job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they’d show up again the next day. He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down.
The last thing I heard, they sort of… robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn’t steer, you see…Petersen was really, really blown away about it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him… he said it was alright and all that, when shoes are happy that they’d get into heaven.
You see, it turns out shoes have soles.
[Red Dwarf, S02E05]
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If the fucking shoes work in the first place, what is the point of a software update?
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Wait until they turn that around: If you don’t pay your license fee and receive an update, then the shoes brick themselves.
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This new wave of wearable tech and IoT is like Fyre Island for the Rest of Us™.
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