Love of chocolate means never having to say you're sorry for feeding the office vending machine.
At the AJC, our mechanical purveyors of empty calories are tucked away in a secluded hallway so you can load up on Reese's Cups without shame.
The good times we've shared with machines may soon be over.
Just in time for a less-than-merry Christmas, a new snack automaton has arisen with facial recognition technology, writes the Telegraph.
The new machine is not yet a Cylon and goes by the name "Luce X2."
The Telegraph tries to paint an optimistic picture by saying the high-tech machines can be programmed to keep children from buying cigarettes.
They can also be programmed so hospital patients can't get an IV drip of Dr. Pepper and other, seemingly helpful, behaviors.
Those uses sound OK, but, just like in Battlestar Galactica, the machines will eventually turn on all of us.
Jezebel, in a fit of honesty, says the machines represent a "nightmare" because they record your purchases. One scenario presented by the Telegraph has a gym entering the info of members who say they are on a diet.
No Twinkie for you!
The manufacturer says the user has to "opt in" for database tracking, but how do we know that promise will be kept?
What's to stop the machines from sharing data across a network akin the The Matrix and keeping my history of unhealthy choices in a database tapped by the Obamacare politburo or maybe even the police, once marijuana is legalized?
The company's word? Thanks, but I've bought that lie already.
Maybe you want life insurance and the insurer pulls up a list of the 365 bags of Fritos you've eaten in the last year and decides to look for safer bets.
Or, maybe, just maybe, you don't want your face stored in a database anywhere. Especially not in exchange for a lowly Ding Dong.
To make things creepier, the manufacturer says a future version of the candy arbiter will have a proximity feature and be able to pull data out of your smartphone.
“The possibilities for the machine are pretty endless,” said a man trying to sell them.
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