INTERVIEW
who used it for their mother to indicate when she’d been moving around – which would create dust and change the quality of the air. People started using as a monitoring system for their relatives, without being intrusive. It’s really intriguing how people find new uses for devices.”
There are worries surrounding home tech and security – should people be concerned?
“I think concerns about privacy are very common – we all worry that we’ve left the door unlocked don’t we? – and there is always a risk with our homes.
“Hacking certainly adds another layer of risk, and as the software and devices develop so too will the hackers.
“My front door has two big sliding bolts. I’d love to click it open with fob, like you might with a car, but not if – as I discovered just this morning – you can hack almost any car that has a fob really easily.
“There are some really profound issues around data mining and right to privacy, and it’s going to be very significant going forward.”
Picture: Shutterstock
Is it realistic that we might see fully-fledged robots in our homes before too long?
“Go to Japan – that country is full of robots!
“The Japanese tech philosophy is bound up with the robotic, but American technology is all about start-ups and how to feed the population with synthetic meat. In a way, there’s a lot of things in American tech that I find quite self-serving.
“The most interesting place for technology is China, where developers are unencumbered by impediments like democracy and local planning.
“If they want to build a 30-storey vertical farm, they will; if they want to take the food waste of a entire city, and create an organic farm by feeding it to one million cockroaches, they will.
“And these examples are not some weird science fiction – this has all happened. China has really stolen a march on the rest of the world – the Chinese know that the only way to survive as a society is through an alliance between hi-tech and green tech.”
There are some amazing little devices in ‘the internet of things’, which can bring immeasurable improvements to our quality of life