The Future Of The Smart Home: How Homes Powered By Artificial Intelligence Will Know & Care For You

Predicting Our Future is a podcast about the next revolutions in technology, as seen through the eyes of a serial entrepreneur. Below is an edited transcript excerpt from "Episode 16: How Homes Powered By Artificial Intelligence Will Know You And Take Care Of You" — the final episode in a 7-part series on the future of the smart home.

In this episode ofPredicting Our Future, I’ll paint a picture of what life in our future homes might look like and explore how smart homes will use personas and Artificial Intelligence to fulfill our needs before we’re even aware of them.

For my smart home podcast series, I’ve been interviewing my friends to find out what tools they use to manage their list of to-do’s. “I keep them in a Google doc,” one friend told me. “I keep it multiple Google Docs,” said another friend. “Each one is dated, and I when I think I’m no longer serious about following a list, I simply create another one with a new date.” One guy used Evernote.Best of all was a friend of mine who explained how his to-do lists are memorialized with stickies on his bedroom wall, much to the chagrin of his wife.

While the tools were all different, the one thing that everyone seemed to have in common was a general feeling of failure when it came to crossing enough things off their list and an abiding belief that there was too much to do in too little time. Everyone seemed to be searching for a magic elixir that would save them more time

I often wonder how technology can improve our lives. One area in particular that fascinates me is identifying tasks that technology can handle so that they don’t need to appear on my to-do list, and just as importantly, so that they won't occupy space in my mind. I read once about the dressing habits of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg who seemingly wear the same outfit everyday. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that both men have multiple identical pants and identical shirts. The reason for wearing the same outfit every day? If you always wear the same thing, then there is no decision to make. You can then turn to more important decisions and lead a more productive life.

How, you might ask, are to-do lists and clothes connected to the smart home? I've explored how technology like the smart thermostat or smart lighting could save me money if they only turned on when I was in a room in need of heat or air conditioning or light. That’s interesting, but what’s infinitely more exciting to me is if the smart home could offload my decisions and work by completing tasks independently of me. Fewer decisions that I need to make means more time for me to focus on the things that really matter.

In many industries, when you interview an ambitious leader, he or she will talk with you about how they will reinvent factory-built housing or the fitness space or retail. However, in some, people will talk about how they are part of an ecosystem and how their success is in large part predicated on the success of other companies in the ecosystem. In the case of the smart home, almost all of the players I interviewed talked about a future where the holy grail was a home driven by Artificial Intelligence.

Think of Artificial Intelligence as computing power that is able to perform particularly complex tasks that would otherwise require a human brain to perform. A motion sensor might trigger a light to turn on. But if a home had Artificial Intelligence, it might consider the time of day, the person walking around the home, and where she was walking in deciding which light to turn on and how long to keep it on for. Not every person I spoke to used the words “Artificial Intelligence.” A hot phrase you’ll hear again and again from experts is that a house needs to be “aware” or “contextually aware” before you can bring Artificial Intelligence into the home.  

Let’s imagine the universe of things a house can be aware of: it can be aware of the presence of the people who live in the house (along with their personas); it can be aware of what they’re doing; it can even be aware of what every device in the house is doing. If you want the house to think like a human, the house needs to be able to analyze the data a human would analyze before making a decision.

Predicting Our Future is a podcast about the next revolutions in technology, as seen through the eyes of a serial entrepreneur. Below is an edited transcript excerpt from "Episode 16: How Homes Powered By Artificial Intelligence Will Know You And Take Care Of You" — the final episode in a 7-part series on the future of the smart home.

In this episode ofPredicting Our Future, I’ll paint a picture of what life in our future homes might look like and explore how smart homes will use personas and Artificial Intelligence to fulfill our needs before we’re even aware of them.

For my smart home podcast series, I’ve been interviewing my friends to find out what tools they use to manage their list of to-do’s. “I keep them in a Google doc,” one friend told me. “I keep it multiple Google Docs,” said another friend. “Each one is dated, and I when I think I’m no longer serious about following a list, I simply create another one with a new date.” One guy used Evernote.Best of all was a friend of mine who explained how his to-do lists are memorialized with stickies on his bedroom wall, much to the chagrin of his wife.

While the tools were all different, the one thing that everyone seemed to have in common was a general feeling of failure when it came to crossing enough things off their list and an abiding belief that there was too much to do in too little time. Everyone seemed to be searching for a magic elixir that would save them more time

I often wonder how technology can improve our lives. One area in particular that fascinates me is identifying tasks that technology can handle so that they don’t need to appear on my to-do list, and just as importantly, so that they won't occupy space in my mind. I read once about the dressing habits of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg who seemingly wear the same outfit everyday. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that both men have multiple identical pants and identical shirts. The reason for wearing the same outfit every day? If you always wear the same thing, then there is no decision to make. You can then turn to more important decisions and lead a more productive life.

How, you might ask, are to-do lists and clothes connected to the smart home? I've explored how technology like the smart thermostat or smart lighting could save me money if they only turned on when I was in a room in need of heat or air conditioning or light. That’s interesting, but what’s infinitely more exciting to me is if the smart home could offload my decisions and work by completing tasks independently of me. Fewer decisions that I need to make means more time for me to focus on the things that really matter.

In many industries, when you interview an ambitious leader, he or she will talk with you about how they will reinvent factory-built housing or the fitness space or retail. However, in some, people will talk about how they are part of an ecosystem and how their success is in large part predicated on the success of other companies in the ecosystem. In the case of the smart home, almost all of the players I interviewed talked about a future where the holy grail was a home driven by Artificial Intelligence.

Think of Artificial Intelligence as computing power that is able to perform particularly complex tasks that would otherwise require a human brain to perform. A motion sensor might trigger a light to turn on. But if a home had Artificial Intelligence, it might consider the time of day, the person walking around the home, and where she was walking in deciding which light to turn on and how long to keep it on for. Not every person I spoke to used the words “Artificial Intelligence.” A hot phrase you’ll hear again and again from experts is that a house needs to be “aware” or “contextually aware” before you can bring Artificial Intelligence into the home.  

Let’s imagine the universe of things a house can be aware of: it can be aware of the presence of the people who live in the house (along with their personas); it can be aware of what they’re doing; it can even be aware of what every device in the house is doing. If you want the house to think like a human, the house needs to be able to analyze the data a human would analyze before making a decision.