Nina In New York: Is It Me, Or Is The Smart Stove Totally Crazy?

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

The other day, I saw a pretty normal-looking woman standing on a street corner, talking to herself and gesticulating wildly. What could be happening? I thought to myself, looking around in vain for a small child hidden behind a newspaper box or a conversation partner to materialize from down the block. It's not that I'm scared of crazy people, some of my best friends are insane. It's just that seeing a seemingly regular person behaving bizarrely in public piques my interest. Then I had a crushing realization: she was speaking into a bluetooth in her ear. She was, in fact, completely normal. It is I who has fallen off the same page with the rest of society. I'm the weirdo.

It's not that I'm a luddite. I love technology, mostly. And, like every other kid, I've enjoyed dreaming about a future filled with jet packs and flying cars and robot butlers and a Pee-wee's Big Adventure Rube Goldberg breakfast machine in every home. But certain things about the future in which we're living just give me the willies. And by "willies," I mean profound paranoiac anxieties and alarmist fantasies. That's what most people mean, right?

Take, for instance, the latest in in-home smart gadgetry, The Meld. The Meld is an intelligent knob which attaches to your stove and, using a thermometer which communicates with an app on your phone which communicates with the knob, adjusts the heat level on your burner to produce perfectly cooked food. That is, assuming you didn't screw it up by accidentally replacing salt with sugar or quadrupling the cayenne or throwing in some cinnamon because you feel like you should be shaking more spice jars to look like a convincing chef.

That is also assuming your Meld app/knob doesn't turn sentient along with your iNest thermostat and smart doors and windows and they don't all decide to terrorize you in your own home by sealing you in and cranking the heat and turning on the gas until you start to feel dizzy, at which point they unlock your home and allow you to escape with your life. And then what? Do you go back in? Do you call the cops? Who would believe you? Will they do it again? Why did they let you live, anyway? Do they need you to stay alive in general, or are they just biding their time? Or is this all simply a testing phase before they figure out the best way to kill or enslave you to do their bidding? Or maybe that's where all those alien souls went that L. Ron Hubbard has been on about.

Maybe I sound like a broken record. But as long as geniuses keep inventing technology with access to homicide, I'm going to keep singing this song. A related anecdote: When I worked in publishing, I'd periodically get an unsolicited submission from a guy who wanted to write a book predicting the precise date of the earthquake that would plunge California into the Pacific. The date would come and go, California would remain attached to the continental U.S., and a month or so later I'd get a revised submission with nothing but the prediction date changed. Now I get it, dude. Just keep at it, and eventually, we'll be right. One day, they'll all wish they'd listened to us. Of course, it's hard to crow when disaster has struck, but we'll know. Oh, we'll know.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!