R
emember when toasters just… toasted? Those blissfully simple days when the height of kitchen technology was a lever that went down with a satisfying chunk and popped up again like an excitable Jack-in-the-box with your slightly singed bread. Well, those days are toast.
Now we’ve got “smart” toasters powered by artificial intelligence, because apparently burning bread wasn’t complicated enough for the Silicon Valley brigade. These gleaming monuments to overengineering come equipped with WiFi, cameras, and enough processing power to launch a small satellite – all to ensure your sourdough achieves the perfect shade of golden brown while you scroll through Twitter posts about how AI is going to kill us all.
Picture this: You stumble into your kitchen at 7 AM, barely conscious, only to find your toaster has joined a blockchain network and is now mining cryptocurrency with your neighbor’s smart fridge. It refuses to make breakfast unless you update its firmware, which requires you to create an account, verify your email, and solve a CAPTCHA proving you’re human – to a machine that’s supposed to be serving you.
The real kicker? These silicon-brained bread warmers come with voice recognition, so you can have a full-blown argument with your toaster about whether your bagel needs another 30 seconds. “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. The optimal toasting parameters indicate your requested setting would exceed recommended carbon levels.” Brilliant. I’m being lectured about carbon by a machine whose sole purpose is to burn things.
And god forbid it gets hacked. Next thing you know, your morning routine turns into an episode of “Black Mirror” when every slice emerges with Elon Musk’s face burned into it, and your toaster starts tweeting about the inevitable robot uprising – one piece of bread at a time.
Progress? More like regress, wrapped in chrome and sold to us for five times the price of a regular toaster. But hey, at least now when your breakfast is ruined, you can blame it on artificial intelligence instead of your own morning grogginess.