I had another dream about something that I think could actually be invented. I’m not sure if I want it to be, but I woke up thinking that was not entirely far-fetched.
In the dream, I said to Steve that I was expecting a package from Amazon. He asked me when and I said I think it was supposed to come today. So I asked Alexa when it was expected to arrive, and she responded that it was said to have been delivered five minutes ago. I checked outside and there was no package. So I told Alexa that there was no package at my door. She asked me if I was sure, and I said yes, at which point she initiated “the protocol” which consisted of a chip on the package activating and yelling “I’m not where I’m supposed to be! I think I have been delivered to the wrong address or I have been stolen! Please return me to the correct address!”. It would get louder until a code that was sent to the Amazon app was entered on a tiny keypad on the package.
I woke up thinking of the harp from Jack and the Beanstalk, when it yells “Help! I’m being stolen!” Then I wondered if something like that might happen, what with all the stories of packages getting swiped from porches. It seems very creepy, but impossible? I’m not sure. Hopefully it never comes true, because we have enough tracking in our lives already.
If we could trust Amazon not to misuse the tech (huuuuuuuuuuge if there), it actually wouldn’t have to be too creepy at all. It wouldn’t need to be tracking locations until the I’ve been pilfered signal was sent up. The biggest issues would be time and range. What if you didn’t notice it missing for several hours? By that time it could be anywhere, not to mention that whoever took it may have already opened it and disposed of the packaging. At that point the whole thing is useless. I guess you could have Alexa send a notification to your phone telling you its there, but that’s still only useful if you’re right inside the door, have a security camera (Amazon also sells those so I could see them actually wanting to make this a reality), or you see the notification quickly enough.
I think I may have spent more time thinking about this than you did dreaming it. I’ll go now.
I definitely thought about it when I woke up. I wondered how easy it would be to disable. Could someone just snip it off like they do the anti-shoplifting chip things? And then I wondered how easy we as customers could actually work the keypad to enter the code when we got it back? And yeah you’d have to hear about the arrival of the package pretty quick or it’s useless.