IoT seeks to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives

Murray Goulden writes in The Conversation that smart homes, wearables and the Internet of Things are indicative of the development of an entire class of technologies seeking to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives.

These technologies want to be ubiquitous, seamlessly spanning the physical and virtual worlds, and awarding us frictionless control over all of it. The smart home promises a future in which largely hidden tech provides us with services before we’ve even realised we want them, using sensors to understand the world around us and navigate it on our behalf. It’s a promise of near limitless reach, and effortless convenience.

It’s also completely incompatible with social realities. The problem is, our lives are full of limits, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the family home, which many of these technologies target. From the inside, these places often feel all too chaotic but they’re actually highly ordered. This a world full of boundaries and hierarchies: who gets allowed into which rooms, who gets the TV remote, who secrets are shared with, who they are hidden from.

Goulden says that technology companies should be concerned: “These technologies are, largely unwittingly, attempting to recode some of the most basic patterns of our everyday lives, namely how we live alongside those we are most intimate with. As such, their placement in our homes as consumer products constitute a vast social experiment. If the experience of using them is too challenging to our existing orderings, the likelihood is we will simply come to reject them.”