We seem to be getting too ‘smart’ for our own good
Tomorrow’s always popular. It’s neither immutable like yesterday nor a mess like today. Rather it’s clean and neat and bright with possibility, because, regardless of the evidence that piles before us, we are optimists. Indeed, so eager are we for tomorrow that we are forever trying to peep round the blind corner, to get a glimpse of the goodies that are coming our way on time’s incessant conveyor belt. And at the weekend the Sunday StarTimes obliged us. Under the headline ‘‘A smart place to call home’’ was a picture of tomorrow’s house.
In the garage stands a self-driving car, fuelled by electricity gathered from the sun. Beside it was a similarly fuelled mower that notices when the grass has grown and sets off on its own to mow it. The front door is secured by face recognition software, blocking entry to the intruder who has somehow leapt the invisible geo-fence that rings the property. Assuming, that is, the mower didn’t get him.
In the kitchen stands a fridge that orders its own groceries. The bench top’s a shape-shifter. Speak to it and it becomes a tablet computer on which to look up a recipe. Speak to it again and it’s an induction ring on which to cook the dish it’s just looked up. This is a house that obeys you as you wish your dog would.
It even knows your needs without your speaking. A health bracelet monitors your vital signs, and with it your mood. So should you be feeling angry at, say, the latest imbecility of some president or other, his sucking up to dictators, his ignorance of everything but his own ego, the bracelet will know. And as you stamp from room to room it will tell the house to squirt you with therapeutic aromas, to make you think sweet thoughts.
In tomorrow’s house you will look in vain for light switches. Without your doing a thing the lights will adjust to your needs and the time of day. The house will know the circadian rhythms you didn’t think you had. It will cradle you to sleep of an evening like a lullabysinging mother, and in the morning it will ease you painlessly awake.
And though the future house has yet to find a way to perform your bodily functions, the toilet bowl will, and here I quote exactly from the Sunday StarTimes,
‘‘sense your approach and prepare itself’’. How is not made clear. Gritting its teeth, I’d imagine.
So there you are, tomorrow. A life made easy and luxurious by technology, a wonder-world such as our ancestors could not have imagined. How does it sound to you? To me it’s the Nightmare on Acacia Avenue. It’s like living on a long-haul flight, where everything is brought to you and it is your job just to sit, be fed, be entertained by the screen in front of you, and imitate your luggage. As if to breathe were life. But if this sort of existence appeals, if you find yourself mentally reaching out for it, keen for time to get a move on and deliver, I have two words for you: British Airways.
For on the very day that this article was published, the British Airways IT system, that sells its tickets and organises flight crew and handles the bags and keeps tabs on several hundred planes around the world, the billion dollar failsafe system, endlessly backedup and future-proofed and fire-walled and treble-tested for resilience, went phut. And British Airways had no choice but to burst into tears and cancel every flight.
And if even that doesn’t convince you it might be unwise to depend on technology you cannot mend yourself or even start to understand the workings of, I have another word for you: Wannacry.
Wannacry was the ransom-ware that hackers sent forth into the world to slither round the internet and into a million computers. No system is unhackable, it seems. Nor will there ever be an end to human malice.
And what could technologically savvy malice not do with the house of the future? What fun could it not have? While it sends you screaming with terror the wrong way down the motorway in your self-driving car, it tells the fridge to order caviar by the kilo and reprogrammes the front door to admit the neighbourhood larcenist, and his brother the arsonist. And as the bench top brews itself a vat of P, and the mower prowls the lawn, the toilet bowl, reprogrammed and grudge-laden, quietly lies in wait for your return.
The house will know the circadian rhythms you didn’t think you had.