Our (Scary) Smart Homes
Home is where the Smart is. But can you really set it and forget it?
All over the news this week: for a paltry $3.2 billion, Google’s acquired Nest, the high-tech thermostat and smoke-detector system that you can control from anywhere — or that automatically regulates itself. Is not having to think about dialing back a few degrees manually really worth such a pretty penny?
Absolutely.
The much-lauded Internet of Things — which I really wish was called the Internet of Thing-a-ma-bobs, for obvious reasons — is hitting closer and closer to home. Yours.
Set it and forget it? Not quite. Turns out learning is a two-way street.
Today’s Smart devices are akin to skimming the cream of both automation and AI (minus any creeptastic Haley Joel Osment-bots… yet). Settings interfaces let you tell them what you want, but even cooler is when they turn right around and tell you what you really want.
Hence all the Nest buzz. At first, you’ll use it like a traditional thermostat, turning the dial to your desired temperature. With every bit of information you input, the device learns, stashing away the data in order to draw patterns over time. Within a few days, you’ll find you’re making fewer adjustments. Nest will understand your general behavior trends, adjusting temperature so that you’re comfortable from when you get up, to when you get home, to when you go to bed.
If you’re anything like the average household, the thermostat controls 50% of your energy bill. That’s equivalent to significantly fat stacks, my friend, not to mention decent-sized chunks of rainforest/ozone/whales as well. Nest displays a cutsey green leaf icon when it’s saving energy. Once it learns when you tend to hit the sack and detects when you’re out of the house, it’ll turn down its energy usage accordingly.
If you pay attention, this means — wha-hey! — you can also learn energy-saving behavior from Nest.
In essence: machines programming us! Gnarly. But if it saves the whales, okay. It’s not like they’re trying to replace the common sense advice our mothers always taught us.
Meet Mother.
From the developers, a French group called Sen.Se, comes this downright Huxleyan copy:
“We thought mothers needed a small upgrade. So here’s Mother. She’s like a mom, only better.”
Unlike the flesh-and-blood matriarchal figure in your life, this one never nags at you to pick up your dirty socks, nor pries into the state of your love life, nor pitches a fit when you forget her birthday. The sleek, silent matryoshka figure emblazoned with a serene (yet coy?) smile just hooks directly into your router, communicating exclusively via cookies.
No chocolate chips in this momma’s goodies, though. The colorful “cookies” are motion, temperature, and proximity-sensing tabs designed to be attached to anything you’d like to track.
Want to make sure you’re drinking enough water? Put a cookie on the Brita filter. Ensure Grandma takes her pills? Cookie on the haloperidol. Turn brushing teeth into a competition with the kids? A cookie right before bedtime doesn’t sound so bad after all.
Because the omnipotent matryoshka (seriously, Sen.Se advertises that “mother knows everything”) senses when her brood of cookies are nearby, you can even use the things as tracking devices for would-be wayward children. That is, if they lack enough sense of privacy that they don’t mind you keeping e-tabs on them.
Although the matryoshka herself will remain tight-lipped, Mother reveals what she’s observed to you through a series of apps. These range from the commonplace — how many steps do you take a day? — to the specific — just how bad is your little espresso habit (and how many pods remain before you must visit your local caffeine dealer)?
Just let Mother watch over you while you sleep.
Speaking of sleep, how’s your slumber been as of late? Restless? Have you woken up fully refreshed?
Maybe the problem is your lighting. You’ve always heard that staring at a screen before bedtime is harmful to sleep. The blue light emitted by your overhead lamps can produce the same melatonin-suppressing effect.
Along with Tang and memory foam, space travel research brings us Smart Lighting. Astronauts have even more difficulty getting decent shut-eye than you do, so developers Lighting Science developed Rhythm Downlight for use on the shuttle. As the time for beddy-bye draws nearer, the bulbs emit less and less blue light, encouraging the natural production of melatonin in our systems. Yawwwwwn.
The corollary is also pretty dang cool — during the times when you want to be most alert, the system ramps up the percentage of blue light. Combine this with one of your beloved espresso pods and get ready to boogie.
Just like Nest and Mother, Rhythm Downlight follows your habits, automatically adjusting its levels according to your personal behavior trends.
This space-age lightbulb is currently undergoing the rigorous NASA approval process. You, though, will be able to access it via Home Depot come the third quarter of 2014.
Meanwhile, may I suggest a quick fix to the biggest offender of blue-light emission past bedtime? I’m talking about your computer screen, of course.
Ever notice how geeks at night are highlighted by a freaky blue glow?
The totally free f.lux app adjusts the quality of light radiating from your Internet Box according to the lighting in your room combined with the hour of day. It’ll slowly fade to a much more red-based light at nighttime, a change which you probably won’t even notice until you compare it side-by-side with the “normal” version. Easier on your eyes, easier on your melatonin.
You can’t rest easy, though, if you’re worried about the ne’er-do-wells of the world storming your castle gates.
No need for Beefeaters to lock your castle tight. Try Lockitron. Or Kevo. Or August. Or Goji.
These Smart Locks link you with access to your home via apps for your mobile device. They’ll detect your proximity, undoing the latch accordingly. You’ll be alerted should there be an unanticipated entry.
You can even tell the lock to open on command from afar, say, if a friend wants to borrow your juicer and you’re not at home. If there’s a regular event when someone will be entering, you can allow them access just for a certain window of time — gardeners and housekeepers come to mind.
In sum: no more worries about temperature, energy conservation, Junior’s location (and whether he’s brushing his teeth), whether Grandpa’s taking his pills, insomnia, or unwanted intruders.
Is there any aspect of the Internet of Thing-a-ma-bobs that we should worry about?
Possibly. Make that Probably.
One issue is technical. Rather than my more whimsical re-naming, Peter Bright would have us calling it “the Internet of unmaintained, insecure, and dangerously hackable things.”
He argues that, as our smart devices march forward into a Brave New World, the old ones — you know, the ones we purchased and lovingly installed into our homes — will become immediately outdated, abandoned, all but forgotten by their developers. They’ll still be connected, but they’ll be completely vulnerable to attack.
Blue light is one thing, but home security — not to mention Junior’s location — is quite another.
Companies have a long and rich history of failing to properly update their products, and Bright sees no reason why today’s devices will be any different, no matter how smart. The cynics in the audience could even file it under “planned obsolescence.”
The other major objection comes about when the menagerie of devices does work, and it has to do with learning itself. That I learn about my own habits? Grand. That a looming matryoshka figures out how much water I drink daily? Well — alright.
What about Google knowing where I am and what I’m doing during each and every moment of the day? Whoa there, hoss.
It’s not just me. It’s you, and your sister, and your grandmama (as long as she keeps remembering her happy pills), and your neighbors, and their neighbors.
Google’s already the world expert at deciphering patterns from massive amounts of digital data. It analyzes the heck out of how people use its software, learning to cater more specifically to the ways users actually behave. This access has always been limited to the ways in which you interact with its products online, however.
Until now.
As Pete Patchal writes for Mashable,
Knowing how people live will take the idea even further, providing insight to Google and others on how to offer the best products and when. If that sounds vaguely creepy to you, you’re not alone.
Folks have been yawping about Big Brother for years, but the trend towards smart-ifying your home is the most obvious step in that direction yet.
It might just help automate mundane tasks for now, sure.
But when Google starts bludgeoning you with offers for delivery pizza plus local weight loss clinics after you open the fridge one too many times past midnight, don’t come crying to me.
