The Bigger Picture
By: Joe Staples
Tags: AI, Consumer Electronics, Smart Home, Gadgets, Technology

The Bigger Picture

Part 3 of a Series — Setting the playing field and the challenges we face before adopting new technologies. Joe Staples Feb 4, 2020·5 min read

Photo by Tyler Lastovich from Pexels.

If you’ve hung with me on this adventure so far, I congratulate you! This is Part 3 of a series on what the next “gamechanger” in tech will be and how it can affect the new decade. So far, I’ve been enamored with Samsung’s Ballie and I’ve paid respects where they’re due to the science-fiction legends who have inspired the tech we have today as well as warn us of the catastrophic possibility that tech will turn against us. With these two ideas covered, we can now take a look at the stage set before us.

If the goal of any piece of consumer tech is to benefit our lives in some way, be it a new phone or camera or app, it has to fit into “the bigger picture” in a multitude of ways. Think of this concept of a bigger picture like a massive jigsaw puzzle. For any given piece to fit into the puzzle, it has to conform and fit the surrounding pieces. If it doesn’t fit in, the piece is rejected. In the real world, a product has to fit a purpose in society or else the product will fail. A product is only as useful as the problems it tries to resolve, and therefore we have to inevitably navigate the bigger challenges that stand in the way.

Rewind back a few weeks to CES for a moment with me. Aside from products that ooh and aah, there are panels that are meant to get us thinking about the future of consumer technology. One such panel really pulled me in: CNET’s Next Big Thing Panel.

If you want to check it out, here it is:

CNETs full opening day coverage. The panel we’re talking about starts around 6 hours in.

The TL;DW: several tech industry experts gathered to identify the next big shift forward in technology and the challenges we will face head-on in this shift forward. This year, they focused on anticipatory technology.

As the name might suggest, this is a new breed of AI tech that anticipates actions, rather than waiting on a verbal command or user-based trigger. *Ahem* Enter stage right: Samsung’s Ballie concept. Smart devices equipped with the ability to anticipate when it’s needed would be able to react automatically to the environment they’re in, like raising curtains in the morning or vacuuming when it sees a mess. It inches us ever closer to the sci-fi world we revisited last week.

If, for the last few weeks, you were wondering where the hell I was planning on going in this epic tirade, we’ve arrived at my thesis!

Anticipatory technology is the gamechanger of the next decade… as long as we don’t fuck it up.

CNET’s Next Big Thing panel started a conversation of the possible challenges and the requirements for such a technology to take off. Of course, it’s a lot more complicated than the simple, idyllic world Ballie (and George Lucus) wants to give us. It’s about the next generation of IoT devices as a whole.

Michele Turner, senior director of Google Smart Home Ecosystem, believes it centers around making smart home devices more secure and private, communicating with each other without any interruption, user interaction, or invasion from threats. I remember an article from Wired I read back in 2015 about security flaws in Chrysler’s UConnect infotainment system, allowing hackers (in on the experiment of course) to take over full control of a Jeep Wrangler while it was speeding down the highway. While I hope Chrysler and other auto-makers have begun working on how to prevent this from happening, the article pointed out just how unsecure our connected world really is. The more connected our homes get, the more vulnerable they become to external threats. If we are to prevent this, we need to keep the communication between smart devices private and invisible to anyone who might be peering in.

Data collection is a systemic problem, as Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out. “We need to start thinking defenstively about these technologies and have them built from the beginning to actually work for us,” says Cohn. “We are nowhere near that with technologies right now and when you get into anticipatory [tech], there’s a whole other level we need to begin to think through.” There’s a lot of justifiable paranoia about how user data is collected and how it’s used. Google and Amazon admit to listening in on conversations via their home assistants, while Facebook’s privacy policy is practically a joke. Still, data collection is a necessary evil for AI to grow. The challenge then becomes how we can ethically gather data needed for AI to learn while keeping personal data private. Now this could come from regulation and creating legislature to guide big tech companies on what they can and can’t do, but it can also come from the technology itself, like intelligently filtering out private data during the data collection process, so private data never reaches tech companies in the first place.

A third challenge comes in the form of making technology equitable. Pushing to “humanize technology”, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva Rana El Kaliouby believes in finding the good in data collection. Collecting data from a wide range of demographics builds a better database, making tech more equitable and relatable to more than your average tech-bro. It’s about switching the dynamic between our interactions with digital assistants, having them fit into any given culture and not the other way around. Take accents, for example. Digital assistants are pretty narrowly tailored to the American accent. It’s decidedly easier to activate and navigate our assistants if we speak “clearly and normally”. But there’s the catch: who is to decide what is clear and normal? If we want to embrace a future where our AI companions are universally there for us, then we need to make them universal to more than just the niche that is mid-to-high income America.

But the good news is, it’s not all hurdles. These three obstacles standing between us and a future of anticipatory technology aren’t meant to stop us from ever achieving our goals. They are important tasks and questions that: if ignored will lead us to further spiral out of control; and if answered, can lead us to having a progressive society ruled by equity in technology. Once we figure out how to answer these three questions, the last one remains: how do we get it from concept to consumer? More on that next time.