Imagine you are sleeping peacefully in bed and then you start to wake up a little bit. You toss and turn a few times, anticipating your alarm going off at any moment. Your FitBit senses the movement and signals to your "Smart Home router" that you are waking up. The router then tells the coffee machine to start brewing, your shower to turn on, and your radio to start playing smooth jazz to wake you up. Before you even step out of bed, your coffee is halfway brewed, your shower is ready and you woke up serenaded. This is the goal of smart home systems.
Tech companies are researching and developing a program to program our lives. These new programs will eventually link to one another and make everything possible on one simple program.
These advancements in home technology are taking away from the simple pleasures that keep us from becoming robots. I think part of the joy in drinking coffee is the smell and sound when it is brewing. Those sensual elements are eliminated when your coffee is brewed while you are still laying in bed. More importantly, these tech ideas don't solve humanity's big problems (according to Jason Pontin).
During his Ted Talk "Can technology solve our biggest problems?" Pontin specifically addresses that Silicon Valley is funding less ambitious companies than it did back when it was funding Apple and Intel. The development of smart home systems indicate that people are choosing not to solve big problems and are trying to minimize the politics that go into decision making. Pontin presented a great analogy about how space travel is controversial and would have a lot of political debates, thus R&D companies are trying to avoid technology that brings in politics. Are these smaller technological advancements, like smart home systems, the country's way of avoiding big advancements that bring up political issues?
Divorce Technology
Ultraluxe Smart Homes
Home Smart Home
Yes it seems like Americans are obsessed with making their lives just a little bit easier, but only by solving the menial day to day tasks. I happen to think this is more a result of our capitalist oriented mentality. We are told that time is money, and anytime we are wasting could be spent more productively. These small but time consuming tasks are often the first to go and I agree with your point about enjoying these little things. People have grown impatient and don't live in the moment anymore. Even if these advances should theoretically allow us more time to spend productively, we often don't. In which case it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense why we are always looking to cut corners, but like I said its more the idea than the actual benefit of having more time to do other things.
ReplyDeleteI see the potential merit in having menial tasks done for you by robots, but I think that merit will be perverted to inevitably harm people. Ideally automated tasks would free up people's days to read for pleasure, get lunch with a friend, go for a run, etc. But, based off of history, I am not sure that will happen. Society has always strived to increase efficiency, from cutting down travel time (i.e.first people walked, then they road buggies, then came ships, then trains, then came the car, then planes), to farm tools that eliminated the need to hoe a garden by hand, to instant pudding! Inventions have continually evolved to make society more time effective. So, if we are more efficient today than we were 400 years ago, why is the average number of hours worked per week continually increasing? It seems the time once spent on "menial" (although, often enjoyable) tasks like brewing coffee, baking a cake from scratch, doing laundry, is now spent working.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a smart home freaks me out. It just seems wrong. Americans are already too dependent on technology, in my opinion, and this is going way too far. What happens when the smart home crashes one day and the people living in have a melt-down because they (or their children who have only known this life) do not know how to function on their own. This also seems to contribute to a lack of care for others in American society. People are so absorbed in their own lives and being advanced that they are making and buying "home improvements" like this, rather than acknowledging that they do not NEED this kind of a home and that there are others in the world who do not have a home at all. I feel that a smart home is excessive and ridiculous, and America does not need more "instant" anythings. We are already entirely too fast-paced and entitled.
ReplyDeleteThe invention of the “smart meter” created a way for utility companies to set different prices for power sold during different parts of the day and then bill customers accordingly. In his book on the flaws and potential of America’s energy grid, author Peter Fox-Penner wrote, “Smarter electric pricing will be the single most important hallmark of the Smart Grid” which he predicts is inevitable in the US.
ReplyDeleteIndustries that rely on peak hour usage will oppose this change, because they will be charged the true cost of their consumption. This added pressure will push them to reduce consumption by increasing efficiency. While requiring this sort of environmental consciousness has historically increased the cost of business, reinvesting state and industry savings in grid efficiency upgrades will lessen this burden all while increasing reliability