Yesterday I came back from Los Angeles, and thanks to all the dumbfudgery going on with the government shutdown and all the cascading mess, my original flight – which I was told I needed to arrive at the airport three hours before to be safe – dissolved into the aether. I found the cheapest possible flight home to replace it, and that kept me in airplanes and airports for about 15 hours yesterday. So I had a good amount of time to really, you know, experience airports.
My flight had an absurd number of stops and layovers; I think it was LAX-Phoenix-Tulsa-Anchorage-Atlanta-St.Louis-Anchorage-Newark-Raleigh/Durham. Something like that; it was all a blur. But a blur that put me in a lot of airport bathrooms, and those bathroom-speriences, combined with hearing far too much about AI lately, gave me some ideas.
Specifically, it gave me three ideas for how AI can disrupt the airport-bathroom experience! I mean that in the full tech-bro sense of disrupt, meaning it’s a bold, powerful new idea that no one asked for and no one really wants, anyway, and is going to completely change the market, forever.
Get out your checkbooks, because you’ll want in on the ground floor of all of these:
First up, we’re going to disrupt the paper-towel dispensing industry! This is a market that hasn’t seen significant innovations since the widespread adoption of motion sensors in the early 2000s. Now, thanks to AI, we can have paper towel dispensing that hits that long-desired dream: judgmental paper towel dispensing!
Here, an AI-powered facial recognition camera figures out who you are, then, using the paper towel dispenser’s broadband internet connection, scours the web for any and all information it can find about you, social media posts, web browsing histories, online purchases, credit score, phone records, text messages, forum comments, whatever – and uses that information to decide how much paper towel you deserve.
Sure, you may end up with a miserably thin two-inch band of paper towel, but deep down you’ll know you’re getting exactly what you should. Let it hurt a little; it’s good for you.
This one is a good example of how AI can expand our own senses. Have you ever entered an airport bathroom stall only to be confronted by a toilet absolutely Jackson Pollock’d with various drips and fluids and spatters? Sure you have. And in that case, all you can really do is guess what all those blorps and globs and whatevers are.
Not anymore! This new AI-powered app will let your phone tell you exactly what those smears on the toilet seat are! Is that mucus? Something more, um, intimate? Is that urine or bile? No more guessing! Now you know exactly what you’ll be plopping your bare ass onto!
Feels good to know exactly, right?
Finally, an AI solution to the biggest airport bathroom problem of all: waiting to get an open stall. Right now, it’s a crapshoot. You just stand there and wait and hope. But, with this AI stall-wait-estimation app, you can get actual percentages showing which stall is the most likely to free up soonest!
Using your phone’s camera and microphone, the AI can look at foot position and motion, can listen for grunts, splashes, moans, phone conversations, and gasps, and even use a complex miasma-processing algorithm that can translate camera and IR scan data into an odor-evaluation system to estimate how long someone will be occupying and using, vigorously using, that stall.
This is a game changer, people.
The future is here, everyone! And it’s going to completely change your airport bathroom experiences, just like you’ve always dreamed.
There needs to be a standard on which side the soap dispenser is and the water. One airport the automatic soap dispenser is on the left the next airport I stick my hand under and get water, oh wait the soap is now on the other side.
A few years ago, my parents got a fancy Japanese toilet, with a control panel, the bidet, temperature control, the dryer, etc., all at the urging of my sister and mother.
My dad was upset by the whole experience: “This was the one room in the house where I thought I knew what I was doing…”
Have you used those though? After the initial learning curve, it’s really a gamechanger. Love going to Japan and using those.
As the good book of Big Tech says, first you must commode-ify, and then you must enshittify.
I feel like this is already happening for the sink motion sensor. I must not be worthy of water. I keep moving my hands trying to find the sensor and when it starts, it only lasts for about 3 seconds. repeat process about 10 times.
I’ve started to think maybe my hands are invisible.
Our bathrooms at work have auto lights and taps and one day I must have thought auto-flush as people were complaining about who left a deuce in the bowl.
This is all well and good but you’re forgetting the real benefit to humanity. Based on visual, auditory and olfactory sensors mounted in and around the toilet, as well as facial recognition sensors in the stall doors and mirrors, the faucet will dispense water based on the optimal handwashing time. Variable soap dispensers will determine the proper strength of disinfectant from gentle to skin-searing acid.
And before “he client” even gets that far in the process, there is the Whether—You-Want-It-Or-Not Bidet feature.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jackson Pollock used as a verb, but it painted the picture beautifully.
“painted the picture”
also, Jason’s “crapshoot”
You have forgotten the most important aspects of these products – they start out as a free application built on a platform that hemorrhages money but ends up being pretty popular and useful because it is fully crowd-sourced. The crowd-sourced version is gradually and subtly phased out once the AI version is sufficiently trained by early adopters. The founders are bought by Alphabet or Meta or most likely Palantir since it’s bathroom-based – until it’s just turned into another social media app that lets you doomscroll other people’s bathroom experiences until you are fully radicalized.
“or most likely Palantir”
…the Brown Eye of Sauron, if you will.
I hope you realize that your phone tracked you into all those bathrooms. It’s on your permanent record now. You’d be surprised how much that can lower your credit score and raise your health insurance premium.
“Using your phone’s camera and microphone, the AI can look at foot position and motion”
Presumably that also covers “wide stance”?
https://www.mapquest.com/us/minnesota/senator-larry-craig-memorial-restroom-787561444
Didn’t know this had been immortalized by MapQuest. Thank you for sharing.
I would love stalls to have a light above like parking garages to tell you if its busy or not. Its very akward to try to open a door and heard someone fighting for their life say BUSY lol
Also google maps could use this information.
The Buc-ee’s solution?
I just noticed that, and put a damn timer for those at the airport haha
Some Buc-ee’s locations have those little lights in front of each stall like you see in parking garages to let you know if it’s occupied or not, so in a row of 50 stalls you can just look for a green one. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to then be able to reserve a stall via the Buc-ee’s app, and then with some AI magic (read- copious data collection), make a reservation. Factors such as how fast you’re driving ( a reliable indicator of shitting urgency), distance to the nearest Buc-ee’s, prior stops at other restaurants for the past 24 hours to determine likely state of gastrointestinal distress, and status in the Beaver Fan Club (buy Platinum Potty Fast Pass for just $9.95, or an unlimited annual PooPass for $49.95/yr) will feed into an algorithm to determine your place in line, length of your stall reservation before the door automatically opens, and amount of TP dispensed. Platinum Potty members get front-of-line access as well as premium stalls with additional soundproofing, ventilation, and a Toto toilet with bidet.
“Factors such as how fast you’re driving ( a reliable indicator of shitting urgency)”
If true our nations highways constitute a national toilet emergency.
“Platinum Potty members get front-of-line access as well as premium stalls with additional soundproofing, ventilation, and a Toto toilet with bidet.”
How much to get a toilet with a target image of the beaver on the bottom of its bowl?
I give it about a year before Disney does something like this in the parks.
-Eliminate half the restrooms in the park, to deliberately create long lines at the remaining ones. Replace the spaces to candy stands selling mostly sugar free gummy bears. Renovate the others to some IP theming.
-Add restrooms to the fastpass, genie, whatever the fuck it’s called now ride reservation app. Restrooms are now themed experiences.
-You can view wait times for free, but if you want to make a reservation, you need the Premium Pro+ paid tier, which is $29.95 per person, per day (kids under 3 crap free though with paid parent, though changing tables do require $5 to fold down now)
-For the most popular Frozen and The Mandalorian themed restrooms, due to high demand access is only by lottery, unless you are staying in a Suite at certain Disney owned hotels, in which case this is considered a perk of your $1400/night hotel room. You’re welcome.
-For one-time access emergencies, you can buy a Lightning Lane pass (price varies by demand, aka, the absolute maximum our algorithm thinks you’ll pay), allowing you to bypass the line and receive the first available stall.
Hey, you need to add the AI-powered judgement-driven toilet seat protective paper cover dispenser–Automatically defaults to “No way, pal” if your name is Paul Finch and it senses that you’d rather be home to use said facilities.
“crapshoot”
har har
I see two really great ideas here, and one that is just terrible. Why not go even further and make it a judgemental toilet paper dispenser?
I am surprised they don’t just go Bidet and use grey water to clean your bum. better for environment and you really just need a repair guy occasionally versus an actual person to actually swap out empty rolls for fulls daily or hourly depending on use.
Only if it has an AI-generated Alan Rickman voice that explains loudly and exactly why you only received one square.
My dad told me when he took my mother on vacation to Soviet Russia (yes he really was THAT $#&%@ cheap!) the three squares and ONLY three squares of toilet paper was dispensed by judgmental babushkas.
Speaking of terrible AI, Jason, have you seen the absolute monstrosity that is Coca Cola’s holiday ad for this year? I feel like this need a deep dive into all the different trucks shown and how ridiculous this all is
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/advertising/devastating-graphic-shows-just-how-bad-the-coca-cola-christmas-ad-really-is
Doubling down on a bad decision (the deeply terrible 2024 AI commercial) is very on-brand for 2025.
WTF does Coke have a global VP of generative AI? I work at a tech company and we don’t have a global VP of generative AI (although one could argue that all tech VPs are now generative AI VPs).
They could be replaced by a generative ai. Would anyone notice or care?
Our internal executive approval ratings would probably improve if we put Gemini or Claude in charge. 😉
If you ever enter a bathroom, and you hear someone quietly say “Dear God, not here, not now, not again.”, you just leave. Doesn’t matter how bad you need to go. Doesn’t matter if there are free stalls.
There is a crisis going on, and you want no part of it.
In my experience most bathroom crisis are not announced so quietly.
A few years ago I was in the United Lounge at IAH and decided to hit the restroom. I sat down and then heard a voice from the next stall say “Sorry about this.”, followed by the noise of the walls between realities being shredded by the person’s bowels. I left as quick as I could, but I could still pick up the odor lingering in my clothes for the remaining 17 hours of my international flights.
This is unclear – is 2 inches of paper towel for the morally pure or the corrupt?
I’m going to make so much money on my pocket Judgmental AI Paper Towel Dispenser Forced Opener. (Patent Pending)
So Torch routinely gets out his camera to start filming in the public bathrooms? Based upon the stall availability app, that’s exactly what he’s expecting users of the system to do.
Funny idea yes. Bad in practice though.
The company I work for is heavily involved in a major airport upgrade project. One of the more interesting things I have found out during this is that there is now technology that monitors the use of the bathroom stalls and dispatches attendants for cleaning based on the usage of the bathroom.
And DFW has meters in their revamped terminals that shows you how many stalls are open, and the stalls have a red or green light depending on whether or not they are osccupied.
BTW, I love the towel dispenser idea.
Maybe AI can tell us how to use the three seashells.
“Hey everybody! He doesn’t know how to use the three shells!!”
*aims weary look at
Rob SchneiderStillNotATony**swears quietly into morality statute sensor*
🙂
I hope you put in the patent applications before posting this.
On the latter one it’d be a lot more useful if it showed you ALL the bathrooms and the number of people waiting for the next available stall.
A stall reservation system is genius
What about an AI enhanced fart detector? And- your phone could loudly let everyone know who let it off. I think that would be quite useful.
Why do you think these things…and then share them?
I draw them, too, let’s not forget
The drawings make the article for me. I was reminded of so many Mad Magazine articles from my youth. Loved it!
We need a new membership level. “Torch shares his secret stash”
You sir, are talented.
I also do art, in this case pixel art for a game.
Here’s the waterless, gender-neutral, communal public toilets of the far future:
https://imgur.com/a/JpO9XHr
I’ve been working on a science fiction RPG which plays similarly to Chrono Trigger or an early Final Fantasy game, set in a domed city on an uninhabitable planet, with 500 million people crammed inside the dome with square footage comparable to a city like Austin, TX. The power, food, water, and life support all get cut and people eventually have nothing to eat but each other, and one shuttle back to Earth, forever. I’m going for a cyberpunk meets medieval London meets cosmic horror aesthetic, although it’s much more Blade Runner meets Bloodborne than it is Warhammer 40k.
Anyhow, the society is highly stratified, and the lower classes don’t have private bathrooms in their apartments and must share these communal restrooms.
Traffic reaches thousands of users each day per unit. No hand-washing, toilet paper/bidets, or bathing/showering for the peasants. The above image shows the facilities as clean as they EVER get. I’ve drawn filthed-up versions as well that aren’t suitable to post here. Urine is reclaimed for water at the trough, and the pit underneath the crappers is constantly cleaned by robots due to water being scarce on this planet. With the blackout(meaning the cleaning robots shut off), and people cannibalizing each other after about 2-3 weeks, I’m sure you can imagine just how absolutely filthy and piled up with human waste these places get.
The function of restrooms/toilets in this game are as save points, a homage to classics like No More Heroes. The caveat is that the toilet has to be in usable condition.
That’s one of the more light-hearted layers of dark humor that is in this project: it gets far, far more vile than the mere toilet humor present. If you’ve ever played Fear and Hunger, you might have a good idea with regard to what I’m going for. I want to make Black Metal in RPG form.
Oh I’m sure there were several more that he didn’t share. Things like monitized toilet and urinal cams, AI glory holes, hailable porta potties (transportation and convenience in one!), and my favorite, the Larry Craig dynamic stall wall to prevent,.. erm, misunderstandings.
Because he knows us all too well.
He is speaking to common human experience. There is no higher goal.
Because our lives would be infinitely less entertaining if Torch’s ‘Tism Thoughts’ didn’t see the light of day.