Smart Home Pros & Cons: Do we really need AI smart devices at home?

The development and marketing of domestic helpers and digital assistants are responding to a growing sense of pressure and hurriedness in our everyday life. They are changing responsibilities for labour, domestic care, and housework at home.

That’s why we see such a strong gendering aspect of these technologies, with the majority of digital voice assistance having default female voices.

They’re responding to what Australian journalist Annabel Crabb calls the ‘Wife Drought’, which is affecting many contemporary societies around the world.

Companies have been inspired to use technology to solve this, but these technologies can’t replace the domestic labour, making them an unfulfilled promise that often disappoints consumers.

Author, Yolande is Associate Professor of Digital Technology and Society in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Melbourne.

Smart Home Future

One of our big projects that I’ve been working on for the last three years, called Digital Energy Futures, and working from home has been a key theme within that project.

Demand driven by Work From Home (WFH)

Obviously, we’ve seen massive rises and sustained interest in working from home or hybrid-forms of employment, and tech allows them to tailor their homes according to these needs.

Sometimes they’re really simple systems, sometimes they’re quite complex. Some people do just buy the latest and greatest system, but for the most part there’s a scurrying together of different pieces according to different budgets, spaces, and lifestyles.

With the cost-of-living crisis, people may not have the money to go out and buy ready-made systems and often they just need an extra add-on or upgrade for the system they already have.

This is very typical of what we saw in people’s homes – there were no standard workstations like there are in offices.

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Smart Home Problems

Marketing from technology companies often miss the mark because they’re giving images of shiny, polished systems that solve all our problems, but often people’s homes are filled with animals and children and general mess.

The robot vacuum comes to mind as a great example of this disconnect. The promise is for this robot to just independently and autonomously move around your home environment, clean your home, and it’s all done and trouble free.

The reality is quite different.

'Digital Housekeeping': Supervising your digital gadgets

Often, people talk about how they have to supervise the vacuum the whole time or how they have to manually mop before the robot vacuum starts because (of course) their floors aren’t completely clean and devoid of clutter.

So there’s a lot of actual additional labour, which has been termed ‘Digital Housekeeping’, which causes people to get frustrated and give up.

I found many robot vacuums in people’s cupboards, because manual vacuuming was actually more convenient than all of the extra requirements of the robot vacuum.

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Expensive Smart Home Products

We’ve pigeon-holed sustainability and environmental choices into narrow areas, such as energy ratings or water efficiency products. One of my key criticisms of the smart home is their very resource intensive vision that is often very luxurious and expensive.

One project I worked on looked at the concept of hygge, which focuses on nostalgic cosiness with low energy heating and lighting to provide an aesthetic design vision for emerging tech and AI in the home.

It’s about trying to find where are those opportunities for sustainable lifestyles that addresses the cost of living because we can’t keep raising our standards to more and more luxurious levels – it’s not sustainable and it’s not affordable.

It’s not even pleasurable for people!

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Are smart home products better?

People are returning to a simpler lifestyle instead of buying the latest gadget, and I don’t see many brands appealing to that.

I think a lot of the solutions are quite simple and it’s a shame that we sometimes jump to these really complicated technical systems when I think most of the stuff people actually use are the simple options that are intuitive and don’t cost much.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Smart Home

Currently I’m not too optimistic about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to be honest.

Just in terms of sustainability, the scale of the number, and speed of which products are coming out of the market share of many of them and their lack of environmental considerations are really staggering.

We’ve got to get past this idea of just telling people very simple things about sustainability and assuming that’s where the responsibility of the company stops. It also worries me how some companies are creating an ecosystem system of products that can only work within that ecosystem that locks people into a particular brand.

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Do we really need Smart Home technology?

There’s a broader question of whether we really need digital voice systems or any of these products.

Do we all need to have individual devices that we’re going to throw out or replace within a few years in our homes? Is that actually a sustainable and affordable pathway? Are there other models that could be more sustainable? Could AI support a whole different shift in how we live in the future?

I’m not suggesting we return to cave times or anything, but we have to look for different ways of living. I believe AI can help us progress and be a visionary in that process, but that’s not what I’m seeing in the industry.

The major movement that’s happening right now is just another version of what we’ve had in the past, which is just a lot of new devices and systems that people can buy at an extraordinarily fast pace, and that is where we need to have a fundamental shift.

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