I was both amused and bewildered to learn that MIT geniuses had invented a “smart’’ outdoor public bench. The bench has a solar panel that powers smartphone chargers and includes “a sensor . . . that ‘listens’ to signals from passing smartphones, as a way to keep tally on pedestrian activity in the area,’’ according to the Globe.

I thought: How smart does a park bench really need to be? You’re tired . . . you sit down. Do you really want the gizmo underneath your ample posterior tapping into your cellphone?

Intelligence is breaking out all over, in the era of the smart-everything and the delightfully hackable “Internet of things.’’ You’re not driving a car anymore, you’re driving a computer that sooner or later is going to dispense with you altogether, the way Airbus’s famous (and controversial) all-electronic cockpit has more or less dispensed with pilots.

Once your car is a computer you may not be the person programming it. Car buyers in the Southwest have learned that if they fall behind on their auto payments, their auto lender can disable their ignition.

Last year, Samsung had to explain that its smart TVs recorded customers’ voices, and “that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition.’’

The clever lads at the New Statesman magazine noticed that Samsung’s description of its smart TV closely resembled Winston Smith’s eavesdropping telescreen in George Orwell’s 1949 novel “1984’’: “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a low whisper, would be picked up by it.’’

Earlier this year, two companies introduced versions of the smart toaster, which the TechCrunch website called the “epitome of connected appliance ridiculousness.’’ For not much more than $100, you can control the relative brown-to-blackness of your bread from an app on your phone. Before the dawn of time, you could do this with a little lever on the side of the toaster, which you got for free at the bank for opening a $200 checking account.

Ah, progress.

Still to come: smart clothing, smart stationery (I made that up), smart columnists (as if). Why don’t they make things smart that need to be smart, such as television critics who need to wake up to the inherent awfulness of the Amazon series “I Like Dick’’?

The gently concaving hip bone called the acetabulum could use some intelligence. If MIT’s many geniuses had been working on Isaiah Thomas’ damaged hip socket instead of designing a park bench that steals — sorry, taps into — your cellphone data, Thomas would still be playing basketball and the Cleveland Cavaliers would be acting a lot less cocky.

Intelligence is overrated anyway. Tom Brady isn’t the smartest quarterback in the NFL — journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick , and many others, scored higher than Brady on the League’s standardized IQ test – but he is arguably the best. I bet you could become president of the United States with a feral, muddling-through kind of intelligence and a complete lack of intellectual curiosity.

Not that that could ever happen.

Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.