I Don’t Want a Smart Home
Do you? Let's talk.
The enmeshment of design and psychology in architecture and human living raises questions of freedom. As our worlds bump into each other more and more, I find myself going back to Colin Ellard’s Places of the Heart. We’ve never been this painfully updated about our relatives’ dinners in human history. And yet, at the intersection of polite social media etiquette and our compulsive need for online validation, we’ve trapped ourselves in our screens. Ellard posits that buildings are political statements, cultural artefacts, pieces of art, or even just simple machines – containers and sometimes coffins, of the conduct of human life. In varying capacities, we have surrendered our data to large corporations for them to synthesise information on our health, eating habits, the way we move, and what drives us – from advertisements to social causes. There are platforms that will track our sleep – if we talk while sleeping, whether we snore, or even if we fart. Humans are driven by stories, and the places we visit, the objects we touch envelop us in our feelings, directing our decisions and opinions.
The iconography of the future is envisaged as minimal human effort in driverless cars, robots that brush our teeth for us, talking wardrobes that choose our outfits for the day. The next fifty years or so are coated in the shiny silver of automated doors and AI assistants who are purported to know us better than our parents or partners. For me, this future is scary not because my job as a writer could be done by a machine – no matter how advanced technology becomes, at best, it can mimic our language patterns, it cannot embody the human spirit. More so, because this vision of the future will reduce human living to being coddled by machines. In the sequestered corners of Delhi, Google maps will not lead to your favourite panwaadi tucked away in an alley who makes the best chai with your morning cigarette.
It’s these small inconsistencies and annoyances that define human living – the scramble to find your keys, the decision to not trust weather apps, or even manually purging our closets of the clothes we don’t wear anymore. And if we are rid of human life of these small messes, it suffices to say that our neuro-systems will become impoverished due to lack of use.
Here, just leave one comment as an answer to the question - do you want a smart home? Are you excited by or scared of AI? Perhaps both?