A house that tracks its occupants in order to meet their particular needs combines two traditions. The first is the tradition of unobtrusive service, and the other is that an object we carry entitles us to be treated in a certain way. You’re already used to the idea that an object can authenticate you. It can inform people or machinery that you have permission to do something such as open a locked door, get on an airplane, or use a specific line of credit—yours—to make a purchase. Keys, electronic entry cards, driver’s licenses, passports, name badges, credit cards, and tickets are all forms of authentication. If I give you the key to my car, the car allows you to get in, start the engine, and drive away. You might say that the car trusts you because you carry its keys. If I give a parking attendant a key that fits my automobile’s ignition but not its trunk, the car lets him drive but not open the trunk. It’s no different with my house, which will make various amenities available to you based on the electronic key you carry.
None of this is really so radical. Some visionaries are predicting that within the next ten years there will be lots of robots wandering around helping us out with various household chores. I am certainly not preparing for that, because I think it will be many decades before robots are practical. The only ones I expect to see in widespread use soon are intelligent toys. Kids will be able to program them to respond to different situations and even to speak in the voices of favorite characters. These toy robots will be able to be programmed in a limited number of ways. They will have limited vision, know the distance to the wall in each direction, the time, the lighting conditions, and accept limited speech input. I think it would have been cool to have had a toy-size car I could have talked to and programmed to respond to my instructions. Other than toys, the other major uses for robotic devices I see are for military applications. The reason I doubt intelligent robots will provide much help in actual housework in the foreseeable future is that it takes a great deal of visual intelligence and dexterity to prepare food or change diapers. Pool cleaning, lawn mowing, and perhaps even vacuum cleaning can be done with a relatively dumb system, but once we get beyond tasks where you just push something around, it is very hard to design a machine that would be able to recognize and respond to all of the contingencies that come along.
The systems I am building into the house are designed to make it easier to live in, but I won’t know for sure if they are worthwhile until I move in. I’m experimenting and learning all the time. The design team used my guest cottage, which was built before the house, as a sort of test laboratory for home instrumentation. Because some people like the temperature warmer than others do, the cottage’s software sets its temperature in reaction to who is inside, and the time of day. The cottage knows to make the temperature toasty on a cold morning before a guest is out of bed. In the evening, when it’s dark outside, the cottage’s lights dim if a television is on. If someone is in the cottage during the day, the cottage matches its inside brightness to that of the outdoors. Of course the occupant can always give explicit directions to overrule the settings.
This sort of instrumentation can provide significant energy savings. A number of electric utilities are testing a network to monitor the use of energy in individual homes. This would end the expensive practice of having meter readers come to each home every month or two, but more important, computers in the home and at the utility company will be able to manage the minute-by-minute demand for power at various times of the day. Energy-demand management can save a lot of money and help the environment by reducing peak loads.
Not all our experiments in the guest cottage have been successful. For example, I had installed speakers that descended from the ceiling when needed. The speaker enclosures were to be suspended away from walls, in an optimal acoustical position. But after trying this out in the cottage, it reminded me too much of James Bond gadgets, so in the main house we’ve settled for concealed speakers.
A house that tries to guess what you want has to be right often enough that you don’t get annoyed by miscalculations. I went to a party at a house that had a computerized home-control system. The lights were set to go out at ten-thirty, which is when the owner usually went to bed. At ten-thirty the party was still going on, but sure enough, the lights went out. The host was away for what seemed like a long time trying to get them back on. Some office buildings use motion detectors to control the lighting in each room. If there hasn’t been any major activity for a few minutes, the lights go off. People who sit nearly motionless at their desks learn to wave their arms periodically.
It isn’t that hard to turn lights on and off yourself. Light switches are extremely reliable and very easy to use, so you run a risk whenever you start replacing them with computer-controlled devices. You have to install systems that work an incredibly high percentage of the time, because your payoff in convenience can be eliminated by any lack of reliability or sensitivity. I’m hoping the house systems will be able to set the lights automatically at the right levels. But, just in case, every room also has wall switches that can be used to override the computer’s lighting decisions.
If you regularly ask for light to be unusually bright or dim, the house will assume that’s how you want it most of the time. In fact, the house will remember everything it learns about your preferences. If in the past you’ve asked to see paintings by Henri Matisse or photographs by Chris Johns of National Geographic, you may find other works of theirs displayed on the walls of rooms you enter. If you listened to Mozart horn concertos the last time you visited, you might find them on again when you come back. If you don’t take telephone calls during dinner, the phone won’t ring if the call is for you. We’ll also be able to “tell” the house what a guest likes. Paul Allen is a Jimi Hendrix fan and a head-banging guitar lick will greet him whenever he visits.
The house will be instrumented so it records statistics on the operations of all systems, and we’ll be able to analyze that information to tune the systems.
When we are all on the information highway, the same sort of instrumentation will be used to count and keep track of all sorts of things, and the tallies will be published for anyone who cares to pay attention. We see precursors of this tabulation today. The Internet already carries information about local traffic patterns, which is great for deciding on alternate commuting routes. Television news programs often show traffic as seen by cameras in helicopters and use the same helicopters to estimate freeway speeds during rush hours.
A trivial but amusing example is taking place today thanks to student programmers on several college campuses. They have instrumented a soft-drink vending machine by connecting the hardware to the machine’s empty-indicator light, and the machine publishes information constantly on the Internet. It’s a bit of frivolous engineering, but each week hundreds of people from all over the world check whether there’s any 7UP or Diet Coke left in a vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University.
The information highway may still report on vending machines, as well as showing us live video from many public places, up-to-the-second lottery numbers and sports betting odds, current mortgage rates, or inventory numbers for certain kinds of products. I expect that we will be able to call up live pictures from various places around the city and ask for overlays to show spaces for rent with a list of the prices and the dates they are available. Counts of crime reports, campaign contributions by area, and almost any other kind of public or potentially public information will be ours for the asking.