Month: November 2025

I must admit I am aghast at the stupidity of anyone thinking that you and I are interested in high-tech toilets that tell us what to do or not to do. Nope, you are not reading that incorrectly … check it out for yourself: Smart Toilet Tech Aims to Make You Flush With Health Data

This week, Personal Tech columnist Nicole Nguyen writes about a $599 smart toilet camera that aims to unlock the mysteries of what lands in the commode. The Dekoda, which started shipping on Oct. 21, analyzes something that smartwatches and other wearables can’t: urine and stool.  

The toilet-mounted gadget, made by Kohler Health, is equipped with sensors to understand waste. The device can help determine hydration levels based on factors such as urine color and stool consistency. It sends data over Wi-Fi to Kohler Health’s secure servers and offers insights in a paired app, which requires a $7 a month subscription.

Oh please, can’t we even have a moment away from our electronic leashes? Plus, can’t you see how slippery this slope is when information like this gets into the wrong hands?

Haven’t we learned anything about informational value propositions? Do you really need a toilet to tell you if you need to drink more water? Do you think anyone will pay $7 a month for this kind of information? Haven’t we learned anything from the frenzy over smart grid data where we thought we could charge customers to see more details about their energy use?

This reminds me of the work we were doing with industrial heat pumps decades ago. This was getting much attention, especially from the equipment manufacturers in Canada. This trade ally technical meeting drew a diverse audience, including Jim Hook, then head of the Canadian Department of Energy. It was a love fest of believers, and that first evening, Jim and my team sat together over dinner.

I thought it would be interesting to hear him talk about his world, so I asked what was going on in his life lately. He was happy to talk about the personal energy-use improvements he made at his house.  Domestic water heating is an important end-use in Canada because the groundwater is so cold, so I wasn’t surprised that he picked that agenda. Nor was I surprised that he wanted to emphasize conservation over efficiency. That is, using less instead of talking about how he heated and stored the hot water he used. But his story has stayed with me ever since. Here it is in his own words:

“When I get home from work, after dinner with my family, I take my bath first and leave the water in the tub for my wife to bathe. Then we bathe the children and finally, we throw some more soap powder in the tub and use it as a prewash for the day’s laundry.”

My colleagues, George Redden and Dick Niess, were sitting with me hearing the story. At a loss for words, it seemed fair of me to ask how much he had saved with this water-saving practice.

Jim was prepared for that question and said that he had done a careful before-and-after analysis that showed he had saved about $79 a year with this conservation plan. I didn’t look to my side where George was sitting, but I did notice he reached into his sports coat, removed his checkbook, and wrote Jim a check for $79 asking him to “Stop doing that.”

You can’t make this stuff up,

I was reviewing Frans De Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist once again in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on why we need to stop trying to fix stupid. As Mark Twain so aptly said, “Don’t argue with stupid people … they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”  

Yes, I know we should not think poorly of others, but I am observing that intellectual elites have a unique form of stupidity. They think they know things others do not. Once again, from Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  We really need to simply “let it go” and trust over time things will correct to sanity.

The reason I start this blog with a reference to his book about his battle with traditional faith and modern critical thinking s that Frans suggests the enemy of science is not religion. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity about things we accept as dogma.  He points out that convictions never follow straight from evidence or logic. Convictions reach us through the prisms of human interpretation. As a French philosopher aptly summarized, “strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.” The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  

Our senses as well as sensibilities are dulled and getting duller!  Chillingly, Frans suggests we still know little about the capacities of the apes, both in captivity and in the field, but in the last few years, we have been getting closer. According to his extensive writing, they are not nearly as selfish as had been assumed and might beat the average priest or Levite when it comes to humane behavior.

Other primates make us look rather stupid about sensing things around us. They can out-hear, out-smell, and out-smart dangers in the wild so much better than we can. We moderns have dulled our memories because we rely on reading and writing, and virtually none of us can read Braille even when we focus on doing so. Go ahead and try it sometime.

Perhaps the best recent book that makes my point is The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb, which delves into the myth of human exceptionalism and why it matters.  She aptly points out that Darwin considered humans only one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today, many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that has ever lived. According to Webb, this flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But are this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence.

My point is that humility seems to be missing everywhere. That is why I don’t refer to AI as Artificial Intelligence but rather as Arrogance and Ignorance.

Remember that humility is a mindset of accurately assessing oneself, recognizing limitations, and thinking of oneself less, rather than thinking less of oneself. It involves a lack of arrogance, a willingness to learn from others, and a focus on serving others’ interests, as exemplified by Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. For many, true humility also includes a deep spiritual reverence and a dependence on God, but that may be a personal perspective.

It seems that today’s world is dominated by arrogance … just about everywhere you look. The result is a horror story is very likely to end badly … I can feel it.  Can you?  Perhaps today’s mid-term election results will point to improvement.