Autonomous Objects Coming of Age: Nest Thermostats and Smoke Detectors

Nest Gives the Lowly Smoke Detector a Brain — And a Voice Wired Magazine, 10/8/13

The article gives a lot of insight into how Autonomous devices can be designed to provide enormous benefits. It also relates to my recent privacy theme.

“Using artificial intelligence and psychological incentives, the Nest thermostat has spurred users to save some 1 billion kilowatt-hours. (That’s enough to power the entire US for more than 15 minutes.)"

NEST Protect (Smoke/CO Detector) and Thermostat.

Nest isn’t only about beautifying the thermostat or adding features to the lowly smoke detector. “’We’re about creating the conscious home,’ Fadell says. ‘To take a truly important device that has had no great innovation and make that device really, really great.’ Left unsaid is a grander vision, with even bigger implications: many devices sensing the environment, talking to one another, and doing our bidding unprompted.”

“Seen in a different light, making your home conscious in the way that Fadell describes could arouse privacy and security concerns. After all, Nest Protect is capable of figuring out when you’re cooking a smoky dish like bacon. It also has a pretty good idea that you’re taking a shower. Add this to information provided by the Learning Thermostat and there’s a whole new corpus of digital exhaust waiting to be analyzed by Big Data specialists. Nest maintains it has taken precautions to make sure that hackers can’t take control of its devices. (Board member and investor Bill Maris of Google Ventures says that some of Google’s security team helped stiffen Nest’s safeguards as a side project.) And Nest says that it has not gotten any government requests for data. The information that the thermostat and the Protect collect will be used to optimize a home’s efficiency, comfort, and utility."