One of the amazing and brilliant and utterly bizarre things about the Internet of Things is that ordinary consumer things are becoming connected things. This includes objects like refrigerators, toothbrushes, juicers, and even Brita pitchers. Recently Amazon teamed up with Brita, which is sold through The Clorox Company, to create a water pitcher that could connect to Wi-Fi and would automatically trigger Amazon purchases of new filters once a certain amount of water had passed through the filter in use.

For some people, this type of convenience is worth any price or amount of ridicule; thanks to the internet, we no longer have to remember to do things ourselves. But all of this connectivity is like nudity on TV: it feels natural in some places and gratuitous in others. So is a Wi-Fi-connected water pitcher a super idea or completely superfluous? Giving giant Amazon more credit for a moment: could these types of connected devices eventually provide enough data for us to manage water, utilities, and food supplies more efficiently? I can tell you this much: the water tastes the same.