S05E14 of Connection Problem: A Smart Home for the Masses
We can finally see a black hole (kind of)!
👋 It’s a heads-down week of writing and research and calls and meetings, so just one quick note to kick things off: A big thank you to all the thoughtful remarks many of you shared around AI and ethics/responsible use cases, etc. This is really helpful in trying to fine tune the way I look at these things.
×
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? I really appreciate any forward or shout-out to tinyletter.com/pbihr. Want to support my independent writing? Join the Brain Trust membership.
×
Personal(ish) updates
I’ve been working on a few collaborative project proposals these last couple weeks, and will continue to write some next week. Interestingly, they all involve smart cities, AI and the angle of trustable/responsible/ethical tech. Yay for being able to focus on this area, and fingers crossed that some of these projects go through — they're all pretty exciting.
×
Smart homes for the masses
IKEA has been dabbling in smart home stuff for a little while now, mostly smart lights. (We had one of their designers speak at a ThingsCon event and I find it pretty impressive.) As you undoubtedly have encountered online these last couple of days, now they’ve taken the next step on this journey by partnering with Sonos to bring a set of connected speakers — and in one case a speaker/lamp combo — to market (TechCrunch summary).
I find this really interesting for several reasons:
- Once IKEA touches something, it’s likely to become a true mainstream phenomenon. When in tech circles it already seemed that everybody had an Amazon Echo or Google Home or Sonos speakers (or was very consciously avoiding them, which is kind of just the other side of the same coin), this was nothing yet. IKEA means millions if not billions more. So, I think it’s a reasonably safe bet to say this week will be remembered as the beginning of a true smart home era. (Not that I think that’s necessarily a good thing, but I think in a purely descriptive way that’s what it’ll be.)
- IKEA is super ambitious in driving the price of their products down. For all that’s wrong with IKEA, this is a strength they have going for themselves. These connected products are much cheaper than what the competition is offering in a comparable league, if there even is real competition there. These speakers are described as less powerful than other Sonos speakers, but taking full advantage of Sonos’ software which seems to be very powerful. I wouldn’t know first hand: When we bought connected speakers we carefully avoided anything with microphones. (See this Twitter exchange with Matt Webb. At the time we settled for the equally outrageously expensive, equally but differently flawed, but mic-less alternative from B&O.) Which brings us to the third point:
- These IKEA/Sonos speakers have no microphones. Which I find brilliant. Want to do voice control? Use your phone for it. IKEA’s particular strength IMHO is that as part of their price-lowering strategy they strip the products of everything that is expensive and — almost as collateral damage — of most things that are potentially problematic. This includes hardware like microphones, and non-essential features, but also extends to expensive practices like collecting, processing and securing big amounts of data. Their privacy policy is very straightforward and looks very solid to me. They simply appear not to want any data because handling data securely is expensive. (Of course, handling data insecurely and then suffering the consequences is even more expensive.) I remember looking into their smart lights and reading all these security analyses that found these lights to be very, very well made from a security point of view. The less features, the more easily you secure a product. I’d love to see them apply for a Trustable Technology Mark and to review this stuff formally.
If you read German, I also wrote a brief column for Netzpiloten to that effect.
In related news:
- ZEIT has an interesting piece (in German) about new Chinese residential buildings coming with smart home features built in, or being retrofitted with smart assistants, labeled here as AI, for better or for worse. For me the key bit is the reminder that while in the West (and many other places across the globe) these technologies are still opt-in, but increasingly they become opt-out, if an opt-out is even still possible. As more and more stuff is just baked into the environment, it becomes trickier to make informed choices, or really any choices in that sense, and hence the tolerance for failure becomes slimmer and slimmer as the risk goes up. That’s why smart cities are such an important focal point of getting all this right: Public space and algorithmic decision making makes for a really tricky combination.
- Amazon has teams across the globe manually transcribe Alexa sound recordings (CNBC). Except for the fact that Amazon never disclosed this, no surprise here — machine learning needs clean data sets — but still an important reminder that microphones in the home mean that other parties will be listening. The question is just which parties, how many, and for what purposes?
- “AI researchers tell Amazon to stop selling ‘flawed’ facial recognition to the police” (The Verge)
- How will AI change your life? Excellent podcast interview by Kara Swisher with Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker of the AI Now Institute.
×
Floating cities & energy futures
Two things that I found vaguely hopeful and definitively awe inspiring:
One: “Oceanix is building a prototype floating island as an experimental solution for crowded coastal cities threatened by climate change” (link). The UN seems interested if not really invested. This is straight out of New York 2140 of course (or was featured there, whichever way around). As depressing as the reason for this might be, it’s pretty awesome. File under “21c resilience”.
Two: “The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be the Most Disruptive Yet”, says Ramez Naam, and explains basically how roughly from the 1980s to 2015 subsidies for renewable energy has paved the way for price parity to fossil and coal; now we see price parity in many places, or even price advantages:
“The policies of the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s finally drove down the cost of new solar and wind electricity by more than a factor of ten. That finally paid off around 2015, when, for the first time, building solar or wind power was, even without subsidies, sometimes cheaper than building new coal-or-gas fired electricity.”
Ramez assumes we’re at the brink of the next phase, where installing more renewables infrastructure will be cheaper than maintaining existing non-renewables energy. And boom, we have a tipping point. A silver lining for sure.
×
Miscellanea
The new European AI Ethics Guidelines are out. (Background and link to the report here.) I’m still digging in. Like I mentioned last week, ethicist and co-author of the guidelines Prof. Thomas Metzinger has been very publicly very critical of the results. (Here’s an op-ed he wrote on Tagesspiegel, in English.) He considers these guidelines the globally best there are right now, but also way too weak. Especially the fact that all the non-negotiable “red lines” for areas of AI use were removed at industry pressure are highly problematic. The final report apparently doesn’t even rule out fully autonomous weapons systems, which even military folks tend to agree are a bad, bad, bad idea.
When your boss is an algorithm (NYTimes). Op-ed on how it is for Uber drivers to work for an algorithm. File under “do you work above or below the API”.
Digital Arts Lab: If you happen to be in Berlin this week, the Digital Arts Lab that’s attached to Bitkom’s big expo (“hub.berlin”) is excellent in its curation by the ever brilliant Retune team. For example, check out Carla Chan’s work, a GIF of which is also embedded in the footer of this issue. (If you go, don’t feel bad for skipping the Bitkom expo.)
ThingsCon Salon Berlin: On May 6th, I’ll be hosting a ThingsCon Salon in Berlin. It’s Republica week, so I expect there’s more people in town than usual. Come swing by.
×
Currently reading: Infinite Detail (Tim Maughan).
Just finished reading: The End of Trust (McSweeny's).
Abandoned: Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff). The going was too slow, this would benefit greatly from some heavy handed copy editing.
×
If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!
×
Wishing you a wonderful weekend:
Yours truly,
Peter
×
Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018-19, Peter was a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
×
Carla Chan: Between Happening (photo taken at Digital Arts Lab)
Pictures. Top, NASA Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al. Bottom, Carla Chan: “Between Happening” (image mine)