he day is soon coming when we could get outwitted by our mattress.
For proof, all you need is a trip to the nearest mattress store.
I discovered this when I bought a new mattress last week. My 45-year-old mattress still worked. Whenever a spring broke, I’d just cut it off with an axle grinder and fix the hole with duct tape. Every ten years or so, I’d blast it with ozone to keep it clean. Finally I gave up and bought a new one.
I discovered that the traditional tags warning us not to remove this tag under penalty of law are no longer included. No, mattresses now come with an instruction manual and a warning printed in eight languages that says “ATTENTION: do not discard contents of this bag.” (It sounds better in German: “ACHTUNG! Werfen Sie dei Inhalte dieser Tasche night weg!”)
A mattress store is a strange place. It’s filled with queen-sized mattresses that all look identical. The old springy mattresses have been replaced by something called “memory foam,” which means if you lie down on one, you’re enveloped in a mass of polyurethane foam that feels like drowning in quicksand. The firmest ones differ only in the rate of sinkage. I seriously considered going to the hardware store across the street and buying a piece of plywood and four cinder blocks instead. It wouldn’t be a crazy idea: when you buy a mattress you no longer get a box spring, but a “foundation” that is basically a 12-to-14-inch thick structure made of plywood.
They do have one advantage: mattresses are no longer bouncy, so your kids will no longer be able to jump on them for fun.
Mattresses of death
They also need electricity to work. The sales guy demonstrated how the remote control tilts it up to a 45 degree angle, dumping you out of bed onto the floor and saving you the effort of getting up. It looks unsafe. And indeed, in 2024 an 80-year-old woman was reportedly killed by a mattress that lowered itself without warning and pinned her against the wall for two days.
Many others have died from bed rails intended to keep elderly patients from falling out of bed, from fires in the urethane foam, and from industrial accidents in mattress factories. Incidentally, the CPSC has also recalled a similar product called natural antler chandeliers, which are made from real deer antlers. They pose a risk of injury if they’re hung at an angle and then fall, potentially stabbing people.
At first I thought the mattress-tilting feature was silly, but I ended up using it every day. However, I admit staying on the bed can be a challenge. Tilting the bed reduces the pressure of the mattress on the lower back, which can help people who need to keep their lower back from pressing against the mattress. This is important for a mattress that tries to conform to your body. I don’t have back pain, so the benefits for that aren’t clear.
Is any of this real AI, or is it all a gimmick, and is there a difference?
The biggest change is the introduction of “artificial intelligence.” One reporter seemed shocked that an AI mattress would cost between $10,000 and $30,000. It’s not that big of a jump. Some dumb mattresses cost over 6,000 US dollars. What makes them different from the ordinary $600 mattress? I asked the sales guy this question. Answer: they’re “better.”
AI mattresses can heat or cool you and change their shape to keep you at the correct temperature and 3D configuration. They’ll need an Internet connection or Bluetooth to report your sleep stages, heart rate, and breathing patterns to your app, which you will lease for a mere 17 bucks a month.
They’ll also be programmed to detect sleep apnea. Many already are temperature-controlled. One study that used a randomized crossover design of 34 healthy adults (but no placebo control) to test them claimed a “large improvement” in sleep quality (p=0.001, d=0.92). They admitted their study could have been compromised by placebo effects and said further research is needed.
Others disagreed, finding “no differences between groups on sleep onset latency, sleep efficiency, sleep proportion spent in each sleep stage (i.e. N1, N2, N3 and REM), wake after sleep onset, and total sleep time” from mattresses with thermoregulating features.
The challenge is how to convince the mattress to adapt to a person’s specific needs. If it’s a pre-set one-size-fits-all solution, it’s not much of an improvement.
“Sleeping hot” is evidently a big selling point, and the salesman asked me if I slept “hot.” This apparently means that people exercise and then go straight to bed while still covered with sweat. Weaver et al. claimed that using bed sheets that advertise cooling properties reduced thermal-related sleep difficulty from 82.5 to 39.7 percent. However, the relevant control—throwing off all those extra blankies or *gasp* using a fan—was not studied.
As expected, most of this so-called AI is really just ordinary programming. AI is mostly a marketing term. But that doesn’t stop them. One article tested a Smart Bed Mattress that incorporated a “Distributed Triaxial Accelerometer Array and Parallel Convolutional Spatiotemporal Network.” How this spatiotemporal network differs from an ordinary everyday 300-line Python program that sends your telemetry to their sales department was not explained. However, it seems likely that a hostile adversary would want us to be comfortably asleep as long as possible so they can invade their neighbors while we’re unconscious.
Mattress Advice
Don’t buy a mattress over the Internet. The store had one that was advertised on the Internet as being ‘firm’, but it turned out to be little more than a slab of soft polyurethane.
The new ones are mostly hybrid, which means they still have springs, but the springs covered with a layer of some special foam that squishes down and tries to conform to your shape. I found it to be a weird sensation. Some people may like the feeling of being encased in polymer, but your mileage may vary. It might be no coincidence that these mattress stores are always next to a Lowe’s.
jan 16 2026, 5:11 am
