Spilling the Beans

Israeli start-up uses magnetic fields to provide accurate indoor navigation
(Times of Israel – 9 October 2022)

Have you ever woken in the middle of the night and had trouble finding the bathroom? Or, even worse, come out of the bathroom and can’t find your way back to bed? Or, worst of all, found your way back to the wrong bed.

No more. Oriient.me, a start-up, now offers indoor navigation.
Initially the tool was designed to help supermarket shoppers find their way around the shelves based on their shopping list.

Readers with long memories may recall Vance Packard’s book, The Hidden Persuaders. He showed how advertisers “persuade” us to buy their products using subtle psychological methods.
Now, we will not need persuading, our cell-phones will take us round the shelves and tell us what to buy. (And, hopefully, what not to buy.)

This is yet another step in the dumbing down of the human race. Slowly but surely, we are allowing machines to run our lives.

I pause for a moment to assure readers that it is really me writing this blog. And hear is a spelling mistake to prove it. This would not have made it past the computer’s all-knowing spell checker.

Oriient has just joined with Google. The Google Cloud Marketplace will be able to use Oriient’s location services to help consumers find the products they are looking for and navigate large stores by their shopping lists.

Do we really want to live in a world where a faceless computer knows where you are, who you are with and what you are doing?
No more  “I’m working late at the office, darling”,  Oriient is watching and ready to spill the beans.

(As you probably know, spilling the beans refers to a time in ancient Greece when people used beans to vote in secret. Beans were placed in a jar, white beans for positive votes, black beans for negative votes. If the jar was knocked over, either by accident or intentionally, the beans would be spilled, revealing the results of the voting.)