Do you procrastinate by checking the same web sites over and over? Cure your internet addition with this new “enraged dog that bites you” system!

Background:

Computer speakers can play high-frequency sounds that a dog can hear, but a human cannot. (This will be important later.)

The Issue:

People often wish they spent less time casually browsing / “doom scrolling” on the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s a hard habit to break!

Proposal:

This solution is very simple: an operating system can have a special blacklist of “frivolous” apps and web sites (e.g. social media, video hosts…). Whenever any of these apps / sites are active, the computer (or phone) will emit a high-pitched sound.

This sound is inaudible to humans, but it causes any nearby dogs to become completely enraged (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Top: this dog is normally very relaxed. Bottom: But whenever a “frivolous” web site plays a high-pitched sound, the dog becomes enraged and seeks to bite any human who is operating any device that is emitting such a sound.

It is unclear if a dog-enraging sound already exists, or if each dog would need to be individually respond to such a sound. A method of doing this in an ethical fashion is a left as an exercise for the reader.

This dog attack situation should quickly cure the human of Internet / app addition.

Caveat:

Occasionally, a person might need to visit a “time-wasting” web site for legitimate means.

Unfortunately, the dog has no way to determine the user’s intent. Although a person might yell at the dog “Hey! I’m only checking YouTube for faucet repair instructions!“, the dog is unlikely to be convinced, so the person will be chomped on anyway. This is just the price of progress.

Bonus implementation detail: this feature could be implemented by web sites themselves, rather than the user’s operating system. For example, Reddit or YouTube could decide “ok, a user should only spend 30 minutes a day on this site,” and then it would play the dog-attack sound after that amount of time had elapsed. This is like a slightly more intense version of the Chinese government’s limits on video game time for minors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China).

PROS: Can cure many forms of procrastination.

CONS: Training dogs to randomly bite humans does not have any downsides, so this proposal has no “cons” section.