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YouTuber Theo “t3.gg” Browne had a bizarre — and hilariously 21st-century — reason for suffering through a sleepless night.
“Woke up because my AI-controlled bed is too cold,” the San Francisco-based content creator wrote in a tweet that has since gone viral.
Browne owns an intelligent mattress cooling system called Pod3, created by sleep tech company Eight Sleep. It boasts a host of sensors that track biometrics, including heart rate and sleep stages. An optional cooling cover cycles cooled or heated water through embedded coils, allowing sleepers to either raise or lower the temperature as needed.
In short, it’s an incredibly convoluted system, designed to reengineer something we’ve taken for granted for centuries.
Unsurprisingly, things don’t always go according to plan, especially given the level of technical complexity involved.
“Went to adjust temperature and I can’t because the Eight Sleep app is currently broken,” Browne wrote, seething that the situation was “unacceptable.”
“Now I am stuck in a cold bed,” he added. “This feels dystopian.”
It’s an unexpected twist in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms. Tech companies have doubled down on stuffing AI features in all sorts of products, making them surprisingly difficult to avoid in day-to-day situations.
To Eight Sleep, which has taken it upon itself to stuff beds with high-tech sensors, doubling down on AI just makes sense, even though humans have slept without it just fine since the dawn of time.
“I do think in general, when we talk about mattresses and AI, the beauty of the mattress is that it’s a huge surface that presents an opportunity to put in a lot of different sensors that can give the user a lot of interesting information about themselves,” said Eight Sleep cofounder Alexandra Zatarain in a statement last year.
According to Zatarain, the goal is to “turn the mattress and the entire bed into a preventative health device,” which can only be done “if we can use AI.”
While not everybody has over $2,000 to spend on a mattress, plus an “Autopilot” software subscription of $25 a month, plus almost $900 for the cooling cover itself, Browne’s sleepless night highlights the seemingly unavoidable disadvantages of locking basic functionalities behind an app. Do we really need to whip out our smartphones to ensure that we don’t freeze in bed?
As such, it’s easy to chortle at Browne’s expensive and self-imposed discomfort.
“Tech bros imagining a dystopia: what if the temperature settings on your climate-controlled bed were broken?” one amused X user posited.
Browne later confirmed with the company that “this was a backend outage.” (Futurism has reached out to both Eight Sleep and Browne, but didn’t immediately hear back.)
“They also confirmed they are working on unblocking an offline mode, huge if true,” he added.
While many social media users had a field day with Browne’s misbehaving mattress cover, others had some probing questions, imagining a dystopian future with paywalls blocking your bed’s thermostat.
“I wonder what happens to you when they go under as a business?” one user asked Browne. “You just sleep in a cold bed forever? This is [software as a service] gone entirely and obviously too far.”
“If that happens, I jailbreak my bed lol,” Browne answered.
We can’t tell if he’s being facetious or not. But considering the engineer’s coding chops, we certainly wouldn’t put it past him.
Other users urged him to go low-tech to avoid any future headaches.
“Get a f*cking blanket,” one X user wrote.
More on sleep and AI: Large Numbers of People Report Horrific Nightmares About AI
Unlock the Secrets of Ethical Hacking!
Ready to dive into the world of offensive security? This course gives you the Black Hat hacker’s perspective, teaching you attack techniques to defend against malicious activity. Learn to hack Android and Windows systems, create undetectable malware and ransomware, and even master spoofing techniques. Start your first hack in just one hour!
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