Now I've seen everything.
Apparently there are people in this world who are supposed to be working on their computers, but spend so much time cruising the Internet, playing online games, and posting on Facebook that they go out and buy an application to lock them out of their fun and games, so that they force themselves to use their computer only for work and research.
I'm not making that up.
The app is called Self-Control, and I'm not making that up, either.
Once you install Self-Control, it can't be disabled in any way, even by turning off the computer and restarting it. You install the app and set it for a certain amount of time, like three hours, and you get no access to any of your time-wasters until the time is up.
Amazing, right?
And who are those people who lack self-control to such an extent that they have to buy it?
Well, for starters, me.
In other words, if you lack maturity, there's an app for that.
I love this idea.
I haven't bought the Self-Control app, but I'm thinking about it, and then I'm going shopping for all the other apps I need. Namely:
Eat too much chocolate cake?
There's an app for that.
Watch too much TV?
There's an app for that.
Yap on the cell phone until it singes your cheek?
There's an app for that, too.
With these apps, you can willingly give up your power to something that prevents you from having any fun at all.
Sounds like my second marriage.
Or, as I now think of it, my Thing Two app.
What a concept! An app as a chastity belt, for your life.
Here we are, living in the United States, a country that fought wars for its freedoms, and somehow we've come to the point where we have to pay a computer to take our freedoms away.
Because a machine has more common sense than we do. Though we, allegedly, have the brain.
As the song says, lack of freedom isn't free.
Tell you what worries me about this.
Watson.
You know who that is, right? Watson is the computer who beat all comers at Jeopardy! last month. Did you watch that? I did, with a sinking heart. The studio audience was all happy, full of shills for the IBM engineers who built Watson, but I feared for all of humankind.
Why?
Simple.
How are we going to win anything if the computers start going on game shows?
Mark my words. The cursor is on the wall, people.
The smartphones are already smarter than we are, and now the computers will be raking in all the cruises and refrigerators.
You can kiss that dinette goodbye, bucko.
The price may be right, but you aren't, when you play against your laptop.
And it gets worse.
