Stories such as these have been appearing in ever greater numbers
recently, as the technologies involved become ever more integrated into
our lives. They form part of the Internet of Things (IoT),
the embedding of sensors and internet connections into the fabric of
the world around us. Over the last year, these technologies, led by Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, have begun to make their presence felt in our domestic lives, in the form of smart home devices that allow us to control everything in the house just by speaking.
We might look at stories like those above as isolated technical
errors, or fortuitous occurrences serving up justice. But behind them,
something much bigger is going on: the development of an entire class of
technologies seeking to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives.
Breaking the social order
These technologies want to be ubiquitous, seamlessly spanning the
physical and virtual worlds, and awarding us frictionless control over
all of it. The smart home promises a future in which largely hidden tech
provides us with services before we’ve even realised we want them,
using sensors to understand the world around us and navigate it on our
behalf. It’s a promise of near limitless reach, and effortless
convenience.
It’s also completely incompatible with social realities. The problem
is, our lives are full of limits, and nowhere is this better
demonstrated than in the family home, which many of these technologies
target. From the inside, these places often feel all too chaotic but
they’re actually highly ordered. This is a world full of boundaries and
hierarchies: who gets allowed into which rooms, who gets the TV remote,
who secrets are shared with, who they are hidden from.
Much of this is mundane, but if you want to see how important these kind of systems of order are to us, consider the “breaching experiments”
of sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s. Garfinkel set out to
deliberately break the rules behind social order in order to reveal
them. Conducting the most humdrum interaction in the wrong way was shown
to elicit reactions in others that ranged from distress to outright
violence. You can try this yourself. When sat round the dinner table try
acting entirely normal save for humming loudly every time someone
starts speaking, and see how long it is before someone loses their
temper.
The technologies of the smart home challenge our orderings in
countless small ways. A primary limitation is their inability to
recognise boundaries we take for granted. I had my own such experience a
week ago while sitting in my front room. With the accidental slip of a
finger I streamed a (really rather sweary) YouTube video from my phone
onto my neighbour’s TV, much to the surprise of their four-year-old
daughter in the middle of watching Paw Patrol.
Slip of the finger.Shutterstock
A finger press was literally all it took, of a button that can’t be
disabled. That, and the fact that I have their Wi-Fi password on my
phone as I babysit for them from time to time. To current smart home
technology, those who share Wi-Fi networks share everything.
Of course, we do still have passwords to at least offer some crude
boundaries. And yet smart home technologies excel at creating data that
doesn’t fit into the neat, personalised boxes offered by consumer
technologies. This interpersonal data concerns groups, not individuals,
and smart technologies are currently very stupid when it comes to
managing it. Sometimes this manifests itself in humorous ways, like
parents finding “big farts”
added to their Alexa-generated shopping list. Other times it’s far more
consequential, as in the pregnant daughter story above.
In our own research into this phenomena, my colleagues and I have
discovered an additional problem. Often, this tech makes mistakes, and
if it does so with the wrong piece of data in the wrong context, the
results could be disastrous. In one study we carried out,
a wife ended up being informed by a digital assistant that her husband
had spent his entire work day at a hotel in town. All that had really
happened was an algorithm had misinterpreted a dropped GPS signal, but
in a relationship with low trust, a suggestion of this kind could be
grounds for divorce.
Rejecting the recode
These technologies are, largely unwittingly, attempting to recode
some of the most basic patterns of our everyday lives, namely how we
live alongside those we are most intimate with. As such, their placement
in our homes as consumer products constitute a vast social experiment.
If the experience of using them is too challenging to our existing
orderings, the likelihood is we will simply come to reject them.
This is what happened with Google Glass,
the smart glasses with a camera and heads-up-display built into them.
It was just too open to transgressions of our notions of proper
behaviour. This discomfort even spawned the pejorative “Glasshole” to describe its users.
Undoubtedly, the tech giants selling these products will continue to
tweak them in the hope of avoiding similar outcomes. Yet a fundamental
challenge remains: how can technologies that sell themselves on
convenience be taught the complexities and nuances of our private
worlds? At least without needing us to constantly hand-hold them,
entirely negating their aim of making our lives easier.
Their current approach – to ride roughshod over the social terrain of
the home – is not a sustainable approach. Unless and until the day we
have AI systems capable of comprehending human social worlds, it may be
that the smart home promised to us ends up being a lot more limited than
its backers imagine. Right now, if you’re taking part in this
experiment, the advice must be to proceed with caution, because when it
comes to social relationships, the smart home remains pretty dumb. And
be very careful not to stream things to your neighbour’s TV.
