Product
Samsung Family Hub Refrigerators
Promises
The Family Hub refrigerator line will streamline cooking and shopping by showing what’s in the refrigerator, suggesting recipes that can be prepared using what’s in the refrigerator, communicating with the smart oven, building shopping lists, and showing recipes and cooking videos — an additional entry in the “Features” area is just a Perdue Farms logo, which implies that some food brands may be preferred?
These smart refrigerators are also capable of mirroring phone screens, showing Ring doorbell videos, playing music and podcasts from associated apps Spotify, I Heart Radio, etc, and serving as a gallery for a family’s photos and artwork. They can transmit orders to Amazon, and provide morning updates with news and weather information.
Privacy
The assistant would need a lot of personal data — food preferences and purchasing habits, location and credit card info to streamline purchases, subscription information to a variety of streaming entertainment and home automation services.
There’s no mention of privacy as far as I’ve seen. Some medical information can be inferred through food choices, and food choices may also imply religious or ethnic identities. I’d like to believe that those are unlikely to be weaponized, but who knows? Could my health insurance company check my butter consumption and adjust my risk profile?
Tradeoffs
I suppose some people would find it useful to see what’s in the fridge without opening the door, but it seems kind of silly to me. Placing orders for groceries requires the shopper to trust that the order filler will select produce, etc. as carefully as the future eater would. This kind of smart appliance seems designed to firmly attach the owner to a variety of other services and products in order to take advantage of the smart features.
None of the features of this product interest me — so for me, the trade-offs aren’t worthwhile.
Final thoughts
It's easy to become somewhat dependent on having the shopping done, never needing to think of a recipe idea, and having entertainment everywhere all the time. More importantly, if the grocery shopping is done by the fridge, there's less support for local grocers — the fridge won't order from a local farm stand. And there's less reason for people to be in the same space as their neighbors. There's some evidence that the kind of loose social ties we build with checkers at the grocery store and fellow riders on the city bus contributes significantly to well-being. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/1130782373/weak-social-ties-are-just-as-important-as-strong-ones-for-greater-life-satisfact
I hope that we'll realize that "labor-saving" may also mean community-damaging, and be more selective about the AI agents and products we invite into our lives.