Last week it was announced that Amazon is to develop AI-enhanced homes through a prefabrication company, Plant Prefab, with plans to integrate Alexa devices into what are being called affordable and easy-to-assemble houses. Bringing AI voice technology into home design and architecture is just another step into the everyday lives of Amazon consumers as we recently learned that not only can Alexa learn, but now Alexa is intuitive. Amazon’s AI voice assistant can guess what we are thinking and remind home owners of what they might have forgotten with the feature Alexa Hunches. For home security there is the newly released Alexa Guard which can detect the breaking of glass as well as smoke or carbon dioxide and in response send an alert to your phone. Where all these Alexa products can detect homeowners’ habits such as turning on lights to simulate someone being at home, activating door locks, or turning off a television set, Amazon’s AI homes are set to automatize far more than this.
The collaboration between Plant Prefab and Amazon highlights the work of architect Kieran Timberlake and designer Yves Béhar who are creating many of the company’s standard home designs. And while many of these houses are quite stunning, I began to worry about several facets of what the implementation of AI homes will have on our future society. In fact, we are using AI much of the day without even knowing it from the complexities of tacking metropolitan traffic, services like Uber or Lift, the banking industry’s anti-fraud detection, insurance technology, to Facebook’s image recognition software. AI surrounds us, but do we really want to have AI all over our home, perpetually collecting information on our habits as if we really need to be told to turn off the light or to imagine a dystopic future where we no longer perform these actions? And most importantly, do we want to live in a world where everyone lives in a catalogue home selection built around the notion that we need these devices? Madeleine L’Engle wrote about in A Wrinkle in Time (1962) where every child plays outside, bouncing their balls in unison, each one a replicant of the next, and I have wonder if we are not heading towards this automatized future.
While we spend an inordinate amount of time online and automatizing our lives through AI today, I am quite cognizant of the harms that have been done to our collective culture because of too much technology and too little real life experiences. For instance, I have noticed a radical shift in how people engage online since the 1990s when online discussions simply did not spiral out of control to the degree that they do today such that in recent years police forces are having to get special funds just to deal with Twitter trolls. The benefits of technology mean that I can send hundreds of pieces of correspondence and not have to pick up the phone or run to the post office and that I have access to information without having to travel to a library. For me personally, the antidote to a day of online research and writing is to live in the real world where turning on lights, cooking, and spending time with my family balances the automatization of everything else. Are such actions to pass into our memory as has the landline telephone where turning off lights is now a technological priority over than, say, just teaching ourselves to turn off lights?
There is something that strikes me about the fact that we have created the social need to have a software which performs actions that we now deem beneath the human condition. I mean, it’s a light switch—not a 100 pound box for which a mechanical robot might come in handy. Turning off lights is a reflex just as is putting our trash in the garbage bin outside or flushing the toilet after each use. And while we can debate the moral value of all these actions, we must question if there are correlations between what we ask of technology and what we allow ourselves to become as a society.
For instance, AI is great for when we have to get to point b—no more asking five people for an address before finding that person who knows where we need to go. We can be certain that we are taking the fastest way to work with Waze and we are sitting pretty ordering our lives from Amazon. With last.fm and Spotify we can even hear the music our friends are listening to. But do these technologies become surrogates for friends we rarely visit and strangers on the street with whom we cease to interact? Similarly, Movie theaters have been closing at high rates unable to compete with Netflix and other on-demand services as the home has become this miniature simulacrum of the exterior world. But the confines of the domestic sphere can never replace the social space of public culture and today, when we do attempt to ask for directions, we will find it most impossible to draw anyone’s attention away from their mobile screens as their head look downward. And this is precisely the problem of the AI home of the future.
Real life is not a wishlist neatly sanitized with undesirable experiences blotted out. Life is about the imperfect and the mundane far more than the desirable with our collective and individual challenge as humans is to work through the muck of life. And part of that muck is precisely washing dishes, folding laundry, turning off the lights, and cutting onions. What makes us human is deriving some degree or pleasure from these acts. Or if not, we still perform these tasks because of the social contract—the care of the self and society. Sure, I might not want to bring out the garbage in the middle of winter, but my upstairs neighbors will most certainly not appreciate it if I opt out of this duty and instead collect garbage in my home for years on end.
So yes to prefabricated houses and an ecological revolution to homebuilding. But no, to these devices that further render us lazy and mindlessly dependent on a technology that should be as second nature as saying, “Thank you.” (You’re welcome.)
