Wristwatch with living organism inside that must be fed for it to work

Originally published at: Wristwatch with living organism inside that must be fed for it to work | Boing Boing

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Yeah, I need porridge before I can function too.

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It reminds me of the life-like mask Slippery Jim DiGriz uses is one of the Stainless Steel Rat books. It always pleads to be fed chicken soup in order to function.

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My half art piece and half research paper is about a smartwatch that requires a wired connection to a sensitive part of the anatomy, and administers electric shocks if it is not praised often enough. All the users report loving it. Many at great volume.

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Other living beings do not exist for our amusement. Why would someone do this and why would other people pay for it?

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dial
I imagine when the slime mold finally breaks free it won’t be happy.

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Every wristband encircling a living human wrist also surrounds a living organism that needs food to thrive.

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ryan reynolds hd GIF

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Well, hang on. Surely comedians exist for our amusement. Harder to fit into a watch, though.

(Anyone who’s curious, the actual paper is at https://lab.plopes.org/published/2022-UIST-IntegratingLivingOrganisms.pdf . The [nominal] goal wasn’t amusement; it was to make users take care of their gear by facilitating becoming attached to it. [“In the HCI community, many have been exploring how to create alternative, more caring relationships & attitudes in the hope that by changing the relationship, users might connect more responsibly with their devices and thus extend their devices’ lifetimes [11, 39, 40]”. I don’t see an explicit discussion of ethics, but it looks like they picked Physarum polycephalum in part because if you don’t feed/water it, it doesn’t die so much as go dormant. Uh, anothing thing I haven’t seen emphasized much is all five of the test subjects were women. Women are, on average, saner and less criminal than men; I wouldn’t want to extrapolate the results to the general population.)

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I’m going to say “no thank you.” If nothing else, I already look after my devices and don’t need the added incentive!

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A complication worthy of Patek Philippe with Skynet as CEO.

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I call my favorite copper wire “Slim”… and he never asks for anything.

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I have a hard enough time keeping my children alive. This just seems excessive.

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Dang, I want a slime mold on my wrist. It doesn’t even have to “do” anything - I just want a wrist-mounted slime mold habitat. Your own personal, portable, slime mold pal! You could teach it tricks. (No seriously, you could.)

slime_molds_are_cool

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Wonder if I can attach this to my tapeworm pet so I know when to eat.

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I’ll take it over robots that need to eat biological matter.

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oh great! another Tomagatchi for my kids to kill.

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Expected End state:

ETA: spelling

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