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The smart home is finally here… again
OPINION INTERVIEW
The smart home is finally here… again After many false dawns, technology has at last caught up with our imagination, says Tony Fadell, CEO of Nest Labs
We’ve been promised smart homes since the 1950s. But the best example for ages was a fridge that would remind you to buy milk.
And we didn’t even get that. So what makes the smart home possible now?
I was working for Apple on the iPhone and building a house at the same time. That’s when I realised that as my smartphone is with me all the time, this is going to be my remote window on the world, and this is how I’m going to control most things… How does the world around you change when you have that? My house – and ultimately Nest Labs – was designed around that realisation. They obviously didn’t know about smartphones in the 1950s.
Well, we had Dick Tracy watches. Nest’s smart devices come together to form the basis of what you’re calling a thoughtful home. What does that mean?
You take care of your home so much, maybe it could start taking care of you. Our Learning Thermostat helps you save energy and our Protect smoke alarm tells you in a human voice whether it detects smoke or carbon monoxide, which room it’s in, and whether you’re in immediate danger. But the thoughtfulness goes two ways. The technology also makes you more thoughtful about your life – about the environment, your money. How does the technology make you think more about the environment?
In terms of energy efficiency. How many people usually care about their utility bill? They look at all these numbers, they don’t know what it 30 | NewScientist | 20 June 2015
means and they’re going, hmm, aargh. Nest reports tell you how much energy you use compared with the month before, how much you use compared with your neighbours. It might say, on these days last month you adjusted the temperature higher than you normally would five times: is that really what you wanted to do? This report has incredible customer engagement – we can see how long people spend reading it and it is off the charts.
Profile As an engineer and designer at Apple, Tony Fadell pioneered the iPod and iPhone. He is now CEO of Nest Labs in Palo Alto, California, which he co-founded in 2010. Google bought Nest last year for $3.2 billion
Nest is fast becoming a go-between for consumers and energy companies. That’s a powerful position to be in.
We have product partners, energy partners, third parties, all building this system around us. They give us energy data back, and we can give them energy prices or tell them when there’s high energy demand. In the US, for example, things like air conditioning and pool heaters are major causes of brownouts, during which there’s not enough power to go around. To help prevent them, we get a warning from our energy partners and we can make sure that Nest-linked devices and appliances of opted-in customers run at a lower level for that peak period. We pay our customers to be a part of that system, or their utility company does. What can we expect from thoughtful homes beyond energy management?
Do you see our homes taking on human characteristics?
Well, there’s only so much you can control – light switches, thermostats, those kinds of things. Right now, we’re focused on those and the machine learning that we can do at that level. But there’s another layer on top where your home could reschedule an appointment because it knows you’re still eating dinner. It could tell people that you’re going to be late.
We’re already adding some personality, with the human voice in our smoke alarm. But it’s not the movie Her – we’re not looking for emotional engagement. At some point you really have to think about the psychology of it and, personally, I don’t want to go creepy. In the 80s, cars started getting voices. They’d say, “Your door is ajar,” and drivers were like, “Shut
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
things that we count on every day and imagining how they can be transformed. And as more products are added, they’ll start to work together in magical ways. If our homes fill up with internet-connected devices, don’t people run a greater risk of being hacked?
We watch out for weird behaviour. We know what normal electronic traffic looks like, and we can shut down any anomalous behaviour instantly. Also, certain settings that could potentially cause damage are not allowed to be adjusted remotely: you have to do it inside the home. We’ve never been hacked, but if we were, we could shut down the hacker without shutting down a home. People are already concerned about private cellphone data being snooped on. Won’t smart homes inevitably create a new layer of personal data?
People often say, “I don’t want anybody to know about me, I want to be totally private.” If you had a human assistant instead of a digital one, that person would know a lot about you and could therefore do lots of nefarious
“It’s not the movie Her – we are not looking for emotional engagement” things. And in the US when we give people our credit card at a restaurant, they take it out of our sight. We have to be cognisant of such risks, and that goes for new technology too. But I’m also a cautious optimist: I think we’re going to be able to cure a lot of these issues.
Bryce Duffy/Corbis Outline
So you’d agree that the stakes are high?
the hell up.” It was horrible and they had to rip it all out. These days people are still getting used to Google Voice and Apple’s Siri and all that stuff – it takes time. It seems like you’re building an operating system for smart homes. Can anyone now make gizmos for this platform?
Nest can’t build every device, so whether you are one person in your basement or a
corporation, we’ll work with you. We’ve got over 6000 third-party developers around the world making software and devices that connect into our system. Electric car chargers, door locks that can identify family members so that their home preferences can be activated, smart lawn-sprinklers, light bulbs that flash brightly when your smoke alarm goes off. It’s not about one button that does all this automated stuff, but about looking at the
I’m really concerned about that stuff – we stage safety drills and privacy drills to make sure we’re at the ready – but we can either choose not to develop at all or choose to develop in the right way, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Any technology can be used for both good or bad, but we’re seeing a lot of good right now. Google’s bought up a lot of robotics and artificial intelligence expertise recently. Will Nest make use of it? Will we see robobabysitters in our homes any time soon?
[Laughs] That’s not in the vision at this point – but you just primed me. Maybe I’ll go back and think about that. n Interview by Douglas Heaven 20 June 2015 | NewScientist | 31
The smart home is finally here… again After many false dawns, technology has at last caught up with our imagination, says Tony Fadell, CEO of Nest Labs
We’ve been promised smart homes since the 1950s. But the best example for ages was a fridge that would remind you to buy milk.
And we didn’t even get that. So what makes the smart home possible now?
I was working for Apple on the iPhone and building a house at the same time. That’s when I realised that as my smartphone is with me all the time, this is going to be my remote window on the world, and this is how I’m going to control most things… How does the world around you change when you have that? My house – and ultimately Nest Labs – was designed around that realisation. They obviously didn’t know about smartphones in the 1950s.
Well, we had Dick Tracy watches. Nest’s smart devices come together to form the basis of what you’re calling a thoughtful home. What does that mean?
You take care of your home so much, maybe it could start taking care of you. Our Learning Thermostat helps you save energy and our Protect smoke alarm tells you in a human voice whether it detects smoke or carbon monoxide, which room it’s in, and whether you’re in immediate danger. But the thoughtfulness goes two ways. The technology also makes you more thoughtful about your life – about the environment, your money. How does the technology make you think more about the environment?
In terms of energy efficiency. How many people usually care about their utility bill? They look at all these numbers, they don’t know what it 30 | NewScientist | 20 June 2015
means and they’re going, hmm, aargh. Nest reports tell you how much energy you use compared with the month before, how much you use compared with your neighbours. It might say, on these days last month you adjusted the temperature higher than you normally would five times: is that really what you wanted to do? This report has incredible customer engagement – we can see how long people spend reading it and it is off the charts.
Profile As an engineer and designer at Apple, Tony Fadell pioneered the iPod and iPhone. He is now CEO of Nest Labs in Palo Alto, California, which he co-founded in 2010. Google bought Nest last year for $3.2 billion
Nest is fast becoming a go-between for consumers and energy companies. That’s a powerful position to be in.
We have product partners, energy partners, third parties, all building this system around us. They give us energy data back, and we can give them energy prices or tell them when there’s high energy demand. In the US, for example, things like air conditioning and pool heaters are major causes of brownouts, during which there’s not enough power to go around. To help prevent them, we get a warning from our energy partners and we can make sure that Nest-linked devices and appliances of opted-in customers run at a lower level for that peak period. We pay our customers to be a part of that system, or their utility company does. What can we expect from thoughtful homes beyond energy management?
Do you see our homes taking on human characteristics?
Well, there’s only so much you can control – light switches, thermostats, those kinds of things. Right now, we’re focused on those and the machine learning that we can do at that level. But there’s another layer on top where your home could reschedule an appointment because it knows you’re still eating dinner. It could tell people that you’re going to be late.
We’re already adding some personality, with the human voice in our smoke alarm. But it’s not the movie Her – we’re not looking for emotional engagement. At some point you really have to think about the psychology of it and, personally, I don’t want to go creepy. In the 80s, cars started getting voices. They’d say, “Your door is ajar,” and drivers were like, “Shut
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
things that we count on every day and imagining how they can be transformed. And as more products are added, they’ll start to work together in magical ways. If our homes fill up with internet-connected devices, don’t people run a greater risk of being hacked?
We watch out for weird behaviour. We know what normal electronic traffic looks like, and we can shut down any anomalous behaviour instantly. Also, certain settings that could potentially cause damage are not allowed to be adjusted remotely: you have to do it inside the home. We’ve never been hacked, but if we were, we could shut down the hacker without shutting down a home. People are already concerned about private cellphone data being snooped on. Won’t smart homes inevitably create a new layer of personal data?
People often say, “I don’t want anybody to know about me, I want to be totally private.” If you had a human assistant instead of a digital one, that person would know a lot about you and could therefore do lots of nefarious
“It’s not the movie Her – we are not looking for emotional engagement” things. And in the US when we give people our credit card at a restaurant, they take it out of our sight. We have to be cognisant of such risks, and that goes for new technology too. But I’m also a cautious optimist: I think we’re going to be able to cure a lot of these issues.
Bryce Duffy/Corbis Outline
So you’d agree that the stakes are high?
the hell up.” It was horrible and they had to rip it all out. These days people are still getting used to Google Voice and Apple’s Siri and all that stuff – it takes time. It seems like you’re building an operating system for smart homes. Can anyone now make gizmos for this platform?
Nest can’t build every device, so whether you are one person in your basement or a
corporation, we’ll work with you. We’ve got over 6000 third-party developers around the world making software and devices that connect into our system. Electric car chargers, door locks that can identify family members so that their home preferences can be activated, smart lawn-sprinklers, light bulbs that flash brightly when your smoke alarm goes off. It’s not about one button that does all this automated stuff, but about looking at the
I’m really concerned about that stuff – we stage safety drills and privacy drills to make sure we’re at the ready – but we can either choose not to develop at all or choose to develop in the right way, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Any technology can be used for both good or bad, but we’re seeing a lot of good right now. Google’s bought up a lot of robotics and artificial intelligence expertise recently. Will Nest make use of it? Will we see robobabysitters in our homes any time soon?
[Laughs] That’s not in the vision at this point – but you just primed me. Maybe I’ll go back and think about that. n Interview by Douglas Heaven 20 June 2015 | NewScientist | 31