Another day in Potemkin Village, OH.

Reading an article on the sim city envisioned by Google’s Waymo led me to imagine its evolving into a haven for other forms of the autonomous that make a point of catering to humans. I pictured a house-robot holding out a welcoming martini while the bio-meat roasts in the all-electric kitchen. It seems fitting that it’s in Ohio, an expanse of middle America that leaned red in the recent election. The trope is 1950s futurism, bombshells who cook, but feel free to insert your own cohort-appropriate trope.

Waymo’s vaguely East German prototypes suggest a soulless utopia, but perhaps some Jony Ive wannabe will descend and seed those fallow fields with depravity. Waymo subliminally conveys the promise that’s it’s less an appliance than a machine for living. In the right hands, it could be quite the brand — more extensions than James Dyson might cook up, unless he’s the real genius behind that name and its suggestiveness, now rendered as plug and play at a communal scale.