Your smart big brother
A long article by Evgeny Morozov in last Sunday’s Observer (Silicon Valley wants to solve society’s problems with data from ‘smart’ devices) conjures up a disturbing future: instead of our governance being determined by a parliamentary democratic process - with its checks and balances of voting and elections - we are drifting towards a smart-device-big-brother society. Behavior is monitored as an input data stream and then presented back to us in such a way as to modify our behavior; or, you could say (in smart-speak) to ‘help’ us make ‘better’ choices in our lives.
A smart mattress will track your respiration and heart rate during the night and monitor how much you move. Hmmm. Will it give an interpretation as to whether you’ve been getting some (or not), with a spike in the heart rate being the forensic clue? Wonderful. A future in which your mattress judges your nightly performance. Having recently watched Spike Jonze’s film Her, with its profound questions on the meaning of intimacy in our digitized world, I’m a bit worried about the unhealthy relationship I might develop with my smart devices. My phone turned preacher – “You walked 3.2 kilometers since this morning. Good Job! Now get even healthier and go for 4 kilometers tomorrow!” – is, somehow, a more chilling prospect than the real-time preaching from the pulpit that I can still opt for on Sundays.
My smart phone already keeps asking me difficult questions, for example, - “do you want to share your location?” I don’t know. It depends. Who exactly will know where I am? My friends? The contacts in my address book? Advertisers, who want to know what I’m up to, so that they can target me with unsolicited emails and pop-ups later? My first reaction is to respond with a ‘no’ to everything; and this includes software updates despite the bad-karma of the red number five perched on the app icon on my phone. But I know I’ll eventually cave. Saying yes is so much easier, and so much more positive, than no. ‘No’ means I’m a grouch, a reclusive, a Luddite. If my phone said, “I understand you’re not in the mood for sharing your location right now. I’m not judging you for saying no but I hope you won’t mind if I ask you again later,” I’d probably be saying YES. Hey everyone, who woulda guessed, my phone really cares!
But back to the plethora of smart devices in store for us all. Smart soap-dispensers that set off an alarm when you leave the toilet stall, the siren only stopping when you activate the soap dispenser (to prove the washing of your hands. Incidentally, for the scientific proof that it was your hands being washed I’d argue a webcam was needed too). But please, please Silicon Valley, don’t start on the loo-soap-alarm things until the taps are sorted. Most of the ‘smart’ taps I’ve come across in ladies toilets are incredibly un-smart. With the soap on your hands you are stuck with only one way to get the water out of the damned tap, but you can’t make it work. You wave your hands slower, faster, sideways, up-and-down, nearer the back, nearer the front. No joy. You sneak a glance at your neighbour to see what they are doing. Possibly you resort to banging the general area on the surfaces around the tap. I know of a woman who may have done this once (but no, oh-no, she doesn’t have any unresolved rage issues; or anything like that). Eventually you notice a sign, scrawled on an A4 sheet of paper stuck on the tiles behind the sink, that instructs you to move your hands slowly underneath the back of the tap, near the sink, to make the water flow. Hallelujah! With the intervention of a clear hand-written message guiding your physical actions, it works! Is this a case of the analogue trumping the digital?
Anyway, I admit, there are probably lots of smart devices doing lots of smart things, that I am unaware of; and they are probably improving my life, or at least the efficiency of my days. So, what I really want to know is when the first smart-arse is coming onto the market, because I’ll definitely be pre-ordering one.
Link to article in Observer: Silicon Valley wants to solve society's problems with data from 'smart' devices
22 July 2014 Alison Hackett
A long article by Evgeny Morozov in last Sunday’s Observer (Silicon Valley wants to solve society’s problems with data from ‘smart’ devices) conjures up a disturbing future: instead of our governance being determined by a parliamentary democratic process - with its checks and balances of voting and elections - we are drifting towards a smart-device-big-brother society. Behavior is monitored as an input data stream and then presented back to us in such a way as to modify our behavior; or, you could say (in smart-speak) to ‘help’ us make ‘better’ choices in our lives.
A smart mattress will track your respiration and heart rate during the night and monitor how much you move. Hmmm. Will it give an interpretation as to whether you’ve been getting some (or not), with a spike in the heart rate being the forensic clue? Wonderful. A future in which your mattress judges your nightly performance. Having recently watched Spike Jonze’s film Her, with its profound questions on the meaning of intimacy in our digitized world, I’m a bit worried about the unhealthy relationship I might develop with my smart devices. My phone turned preacher – “You walked 3.2 kilometers since this morning. Good Job! Now get even healthier and go for 4 kilometers tomorrow!” – is, somehow, a more chilling prospect than the real-time preaching from the pulpit that I can still opt for on Sundays.
My smart phone already keeps asking me difficult questions, for example, - “do you want to share your location?” I don’t know. It depends. Who exactly will know where I am? My friends? The contacts in my address book? Advertisers, who want to know what I’m up to, so that they can target me with unsolicited emails and pop-ups later? My first reaction is to respond with a ‘no’ to everything; and this includes software updates despite the bad-karma of the red number five perched on the app icon on my phone. But I know I’ll eventually cave. Saying yes is so much easier, and so much more positive, than no. ‘No’ means I’m a grouch, a reclusive, a Luddite. If my phone said, “I understand you’re not in the mood for sharing your location right now. I’m not judging you for saying no but I hope you won’t mind if I ask you again later,” I’d probably be saying YES. Hey everyone, who woulda guessed, my phone really cares!
But back to the plethora of smart devices in store for us all. Smart soap-dispensers that set off an alarm when you leave the toilet stall, the siren only stopping when you activate the soap dispenser (to prove the washing of your hands. Incidentally, for the scientific proof that it was your hands being washed I’d argue a webcam was needed too). But please, please Silicon Valley, don’t start on the loo-soap-alarm things until the taps are sorted. Most of the ‘smart’ taps I’ve come across in ladies toilets are incredibly un-smart. With the soap on your hands you are stuck with only one way to get the water out of the damned tap, but you can’t make it work. You wave your hands slower, faster, sideways, up-and-down, nearer the back, nearer the front. No joy. You sneak a glance at your neighbour to see what they are doing. Possibly you resort to banging the general area on the surfaces around the tap. I know of a woman who may have done this once (but no, oh-no, she doesn’t have any unresolved rage issues; or anything like that). Eventually you notice a sign, scrawled on an A4 sheet of paper stuck on the tiles behind the sink, that instructs you to move your hands slowly underneath the back of the tap, near the sink, to make the water flow. Hallelujah! With the intervention of a clear hand-written message guiding your physical actions, it works! Is this a case of the analogue trumping the digital?
Anyway, I admit, there are probably lots of smart devices doing lots of smart things, that I am unaware of; and they are probably improving my life, or at least the efficiency of my days. So, what I really want to know is when the first smart-arse is coming onto the market, because I’ll definitely be pre-ordering one.
Link to article in Observer: Silicon Valley wants to solve society's problems with data from 'smart' devices
22 July 2014 Alison Hackett