YouTuber Theo "t3.gg" Browne had a bizarre — and hilariously 21st-century — reason for suffering through a sleepless night.
"Woke up because my AI-controlled bed is too cold," the San Francisco-based content creator wrote in a tweet that has since gone viral.
Browne owns an intelligent mattress cooling system called Pod3, created by sleep tech company Eight Sleep. It boasts a host of sensors that track biometrics, including heart rate and sleep stages. An optional cooling cover cycles cooled or heated water through embedded coils, allowing sleepers to either raise or lower the temperature as needed.
In short, it's an incredibly convoluted system, designed to reengineer something we've taken for granted for centuries.
Unsurprisingly, things don't always go according to plan, especially given the level of technical complexity involved.
"Went to adjust temperature and I can’t because the Eight Sleep app is currently broken," Browne wrote, seething that the situation was "unacceptable."
"Now I am stuck in a cold bed," he added. "This feels dystopian."
It's an unexpected twist in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms. Tech companies have doubled down on stuffing AI features in all sorts of products, making them surprisingly difficult to avoid in day-to-day situations.
To Eight Sleep, which has taken it upon itself to stuff beds with high-tech sensors, doubling down on AI just makes sense, even though humans have slept without it just fine since the dawn of time.
"I do think in general, when we talk about mattresses and AI, the beauty of the mattress is that it's a huge surface that presents an opportunity to put in a lot of different sensors that can give the user a lot of interesting information about themselves," said Eight Sleep cofounder Alexandra Zatarain in a statement last year.
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