Echo

Another company-wide work gift to celebrate a drug approval or drug launch or something.  And, yet again, a gift that I am more than likely to never ever use.  An Amazon Echo Dot.  I don’t care much for owning a smart speaker, since the only inevitable evolution of these will be to start spying on you.  And I just don’t see the point – why do I need this thing to control my house, I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself.  It is just providing solutions to things that are not a problem in the first place.  It came with a connected light bulb – so now I can tell it to turn on the lights instead of getting off my fat ass and switching them on manually like the old-fashioned fuddy-duddy I am.  Ridiculous, and yet another step towards turning us all into the obese and feeble humans seen in WALL-E.  It’s constantly listening, like the Big Brother it wants to be, and I just find that somewhat suspicious and off-putting.  So just shoot me an e-mail if you’d like one for a Christmas present!