The Brave Little Toaster
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they’re doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:
This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media’s Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year’s CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908
Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there’s a credulous, Poe’s-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/
As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the “Internet of Things” hype we were mired in. It’s called “The Brave Little Toaster”, and it was published in MIT Tech Review’s TRSF anthology in 2011:
http://bestsf.net/trsf-the-best-new-science-fiction-technology-review-2011/
The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.
So I figured I’d republish The Brave Little Toaster; it’s been reprinted here and there since (there’s a high school English textbook that included it, along with a bunch of pretty fun exercises for students), and I podcasted it back in the day:
A word about the title of this story. It should sound familiar – I nicked it from a brilliant story by Tom Disch that was made into a very weird cartoon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8C_JaT8Lvg
My story is one of several I wrote by stealing the titles of other stories and riffing on them; they were very successful, winning several awards, getting widely translated and reprinted, and so on:
https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/
All right, on to the story!
Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there’s a credulous, Poe’s-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:
“I like em big and STUPID
I like em big and REAL DUMB”
(via mostlysignssomeportents)


















