Pudding dispenser designed to make kids cry
Dan Seitz 
You know what we’ve been missing, as a society? The ability for vending machines to discriminate against you. Oh, sure, they’ve gotten candy stuck in their gears, they’ve eaten your change, but those are mechanical failures, not deliberately withholding food based on your physical characteristics. Intel and Kraft have decided a vending machine really needs to be able to tell people “I don’t like you, SO NO PUDDING FOR YOU!”
OK, they’re more polite than that, but that’s literally what their new sample dispenser is designed to do.
The dispenser is for Jello Temptations, Jello’s ongoing and kind of sad attempt to get anybody over the age of five or not currently in a hospital to give a crap about pudding. They wanted to dispense samples, but only wanted adults to get them.
So they paid Intel to design a dispenser that scans your face. If it determines that a child is trying to get pudding, it not only shuts down, it actually tells the kid to step away from the machine. You know, because a robot recognizing your age and issuing you orders isn’t weird or troubling or anything.
Believe it or not, this is not a gimmick: Kraft was genuinely concerned that brats might eat all the pudding from the sample dispensers and leave none for the adults, who are the actual target market. And other companies are excited because instead of some grandma with an apron, they can just program a food dispensing robot to hand out samples, but only to the markets that they want to get the samples.
We’ve really got to ask if they thought this one through, because it’s almost inevitable some Madison Avenue clod will program one of these things to, say, not dispense to women, or some idiot will hack it and have it scream racial slurs at black people. We see either of those bringing lots of the wrong publicity.
Jello Temptations: Paving the Way for Racist Machinery
New Sampling Machine Can Gauge Your Age and Sex [USAToday]
follow guyism:
Other Stories You Might LIke
iPhone Scuba Case is self-explanatory
iPhone money clip lets you lose your phone AND your money
Google wants you to buy the world a Coke
comment on this story
blog comments powered by Disqus