How the Internet of Things Limits Consumer Choice
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Recently we had the choice of buying heat pumps with a standard infrared remote control, or heat pumps with wifi.
You can control them from your ipad! As a bit of a hacker I'd love to play with this and see if I could attach them to temperature sensors and smarts around the house.
Tempting, but then a colleague pointed out that it almost certainly comes pre-packaged with bullshit closed source software from a bullshit company, full of bullshit security holes and probably never gets updates. Your chances of plugging into it with a random python script are close to nil. If it ever breaks, you'll have to pay $100 for some technically illiterate heat pump repairman to try and diagnose the issues. Good luck with that, and no thanks.
Though, most IoT devices I came across are closed and of very bad quality (security issues, no updates, phone home, etc), are very dumb (brain sits "in the cloud"), often consume more energy over time and actions take longer than with normal devices (it's all about physical laws, if you want to boil water with less energy it will take longer...).
Ironically, most IoT devices don't make senses in average households. Most devices simply cannot use less energy, or can be used in the night. Do you want that your washing machine starts in a room above you in the middle of the night? How will the shirts look like in the next morning? Is it funny to use the loud vacuum cleaner for 2 hours, whereas your older model had more power and you had finished your work in 1 hour? Also a recent news article highlighted that several companies from Germany (and likely other countries) like Siemens, Bosch, Miele are cheating with the energy certificate tests of household devices - exactly like VW/Bosch with Volkswagen cars. If you set a modern Miele washing machine to 60 degree Celsius it splash your shirts for a few seconds with 58 degree water (the period of the EU tests) and then use colder water (below 40 degree) for the remaining wash cycle. So they cheat to achieve the tests and consumers buy such devices. So a recent "smart device" device is often a bad investment (and sometime it even cheats on you) - there are only a few exceptions. And one is better of if it is build of open source components.
And most of all to make sure, that they can easily switch vendors, because all devices are able to talk to each other.
If I today chose one vendor to make my heating at home smarter, I am stuck with this vendor, even if others provide better interfaces or tools in the future.
This cripples user friendly innovation and what not.
So, because governments do not (or do not want to) understand (be it on their own or because of lobbying), we as customers are facing a very grim looking IoT. At least, if I try to look into the future.
Not just regulation - we also need proper liability. If the product you sell causes damage (for whatever reason - security vulnerabilities included) then the manufacturer need to be liable. Just like every other industry.
Some people will complain this will make current software development practices impossible. I join with Dan Geer and PHK's considered reply[1]:
Yes, please! That was exactly the idea.
Perhaps once consumers catch on to this, manufacturers will start to compete on whose products are supported the longest. Maybe.
I am not annoyed when my bottle of laundry detergent empties. Even complaining the manufacturer only put 58 oz in the bottle knowing I'd have to buy more bottles doesn't impress me, I can see its not full and read right on the label. This isn't a serious problem at all for me because I see the exact amount thats in a bottle and purchasing more detergent transparently fits into my lifestyle as needed. It might be an environmental disaster to pollute the country with 10% more partially full detergent bottles, but for me personally, eh, whatever.
What does annoy me is someone intentionally puts no heat sink on transistors or intentionally installs low temp rated capacitors such that randomly at some totally inconvenient time the appliance suddenly catastrophically fails, then I need to shop, be home for an entire day to coordinate delivery, figure out the new appliance on its schedule, its a huge PITA on the personal level. If it were scheduled and predictable, well, no problem then.
I'd welcome a planned obsolescence clothes washer, for example, that had a five digit counter on the panel and when it reached zero I had to buy another. I could organize my life around that very conveniently.
Sadly, I think we are heading towards exactly this future - except that it won't be a counter on a washing machine, it will be the extent of your lease for it. You renew your lease for the washing machine, the company replaces it with a new model and recyc^H^H^H^H^Hthrows away the old one. Hardware companies are starting to embrace DRM and connecting machines to the Internet for mostly user-hostile reasons. It's becoming less and less common that you can buy a device and utilize it to its full power the way you like. You have to pay additional fees to flip some bits that unlock functionality of your welder. Your laser cutter needs to be connected to the cloud all the time so that when the manufacturer goes down or pivots, your device gets bricked. One would think that DRMing coffee brewers is a dumbest idea ever, but in fact it is successful. As the old HN quote goes, "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."[0]
We don't own our homes. We don't own our cars. We don't own our software. We don't own our phones. We're beginning to lose ownership over basic appliances. I'm not 100% sure yet if this trend is plain evil, but it sure feels like it.
We're peasants, we don't own anything and if we think we do it'll be taken away. That's an annoying and unpleasant lesson to learn, but learning it has its own value.
There is a decay of civilization aspect... you can tell a culture is dying when specialization dies. One way specialization dies is by making it cheaper to dis-intermediate and eliminate the specialization. Soon, it'll be too expensive for all but the rich to own clothes washers that run for more than a year. At that point we'll rent the use of a rich guys laundromat, or we'll hand wash. That lack of specialization is an indicator of societal collapse. "we will all share cars (via an app)" or "we will all share place-to-crash couches (via an app)" are the same deal. In that way it's a symptom of decay, not really evil. Evil would be setting off the collapse, encouraging it, trying to drag everyone else down... its like saying the blood chemistry lab results of a dying guy are evil; not really; the guy who shot him might be evil, but symptoms of the process are just an observation.
Another example.. the only ways to get high quality wood furniture or wood work is either be very rich, have very poor taste, or become a woodworker yourself. Luckily I find it fun and relaxing as a hobby, although it's absolutely pitiful that due to de-specialization the best way for a software dev to obtain good carpentry work is to learn to do it himself.
There are probably ways to make money off these large scale very long term trends. Rome didn't fall in a day, lots of money made on the way down.
Case in point: yesterday I ordered 10 quality LED bulbs. 2 of them are completely broken; one failed immediately, another after few hours.
Well, there's evil and there is not evil. People follow incentives, I know, and this alone is enough to explain most of the shit the world is in. Moloch does what it wants, but it is sometimes open to suggestions. There are people in positions to chose relatively freely, whose choices end up setting the trends for the rest to follow, and those quite often are the shooters from your example.
I've never heard an argument that "lack of specialization is an indicator of societal collapse" before. Do you have any sources arguing that to read? I'm interested.
Or, isomorphically, you can pay less for a welder that doesn't have features that you don't care about. That's certainly true in the case of Rigol DSOs. You get a nice, entry-level performance scope at a nice, entry-level price. If you need more features, some are available via a software unlock. (Naturally, this scheme has been broken by some enterprising souls, but most people can't be bothered to chase that down to avoid paying the upgrade fee iff they need the additional features/performance.)
This allows Rigol to make and stock a smaller number of physical SKUs (meaning the volume per SKU is higher and the price per SKU is lower). Some of that savings is passed to the consumer and some is kept by Rigol. Seems entirely reasonable (and unlike the laser cutter example, doesn't require on-going internet connectivity to Rigol and Rigol has no way to remotely brick [intentionally or via going out of business] your scope).
That sounds like a win to consumers to me.
This is very much incorrect. Device hacking has a subculture of brilliant techies that make an art out of finding and exploiting these holes. This subculture is most visibly responsible for iPhone jailbreaks, but they will hack anything they can get their hands on and post up their findings on blog posts and forums for other hackers to build on.
I consider the general inadequacy of product engineering to be a huge boon to the rest of us. Hell, even the DMCA can be seen as sad engineering as its mechanisms simply aren't sufficient to stop these guys.
What if I don't want to find and exploit holes. What if I just want to connect to a well-documented API and use that to communicate with the device I own?
I like hacking. Building haphazard cool things is fun. Reverse engineering other people's black box software is interesting, and probably fun for some people, but it just sounds annoying to me.
(which is to say my level of motivation isn't high enough to deal with all that)
Building on top of hacks is, once you get used to it, not all that much harder than integrating an API. Just another problem to solve. Break down problems, isolate the solutions so they can be tested independently, keep all your work in source control, treat deployment to devices as a first-order concern, and always keep a backup plan for when the device fails. You'd have to do most these things when integrating an API anyway.
an Arduino and a $15 PID will give you a better result anyway, and you'll also get to have the luxury of better sensor distribution, since you can instrument all of that stuff yourself.
The major problem I have with IoT stuff, is that outside of the initial telemetry/sensor/data gathering phase, many of these devices won't change...The idea of a smart thermostat is not really special, nor is the app. Where the IoT would be best is in making it easy to diagnose heat loss in the system/air delivery inconsistency, and then provide a way to make physical changes to the system to improve things. Barring a way to act on the data, its useless. Its also useless to continually collect data over time, since the system has already been optimized. (unless you're expecting your instrumentation to either measure degradation of performance over time, or you can incorporate the instruments into a closed-loop system where they validate that the output remains constant).
Also the need to implement an API means you have to make the design of your thermostat API-friendly. So that gets harder too.
If I need to hack a device, Google usually gets me there.
I messed around with it some years ago when it was new but haven't permanently implemented anything. I ran into the following problems:
1) UI. When my MiL visits she's at the Asimov-ian technological level where everything I do is at a high enough tech level to be magic, and correspondingly she's scared/intimidated and its all just a non-starter. She still has a round honeywell with a mercury switch at her house and occasionally does the typical woman thing of adjusting it multiple times a day to either 85 or 60 degrees while complaining "it doesn't work". To a lesser extent my wife does the same thing, seeing as they're related I'm not surprised. I've tested it and it works, its just that automatic control even at the simple round honeywell thermostat level is beyond her, pretty much. This will make smart thermostats a hard sell. Magic being interchangeable with Magic, this makes smart thermostats a hard sell to most of the population, why not just put a sticker on the existing thermostat like those stickers that increase cell phone battery life 50% or reduce RF exposure by 100%, or basically the entire audiophile industry in a nutshell, or astrology. I mean a controls engineer KNOWS the bode stability plot analysis of that algorithm is superior, but to the general public its just expensive, much harder to use, astrology. Astrology being cheaper to implement than actual control theory, I guarantee the IoT will be polluted by "smart" things that are actually dumber than "dumb" things, but none the less very well marketed and likely very successful sellers because they'll be cheaper.
2) Improvement is missing. I had some ideas that sucked, but were fun to try. So cycle the ventilation fan on and off at some rate to save energy rather than run all the time. Well that makes the place stuffy and if I wanted a stuffy moldy house I'd have installed a smaller cheaper fan, I'm not paying this kind of mortgage per month to choke or be chilly, etc. I ran into similar problems with messing with temperature control, such that anything I did to alter temperatures MOSTLY just reduced comfort. As far as saving money this was not cheap back then and probably not even now, and I should have spent a couple $$$ on yet more insulation, or even newer windows, or an ever more efficient furnace, etc. The one protocol that was a winner WRT comfort was slightly warmer temps in the morning when getting up and gradual lowering by bedtime. A lot of IoT projects are like this, very techno cool nerdy impressive display of hard work and solved engineering problems, but none the less completely utterly useless in practice. Why, if I spend $300 and a lot of hours, I can turn my nice comfy house into a drafty/stuffy dump, but its cheaper just to spend $100K less on the house if you want to slum it.
Anyone talking about IoT should be required to watch the black and white (free) Buster Keaton movie from about a century ago titled "electric house". There's nothing new under the sun and back when electrification was a "thing" there were plenty of crazy gadget ideas that could be made fun of (see the movie) but had no long term impact. A century from now, 99%+ of IoT will look to the future like Keaton's "electric house" looks to us. There is another immense insight to "electric house" movie that arguably the biggest impact of electricity to daily life is the microwave oven, which obviously was not predictable. If there is any high impact IoT device in the future, it won't be the 24352th model of thermostat, it'll be something unimaginable today, or at least unimaginable to almost everyone. Aside from the multiple learning aspects, Buster Keaton is hilarious so its worth the time.
I think there's a missing UX opportunity here no one is taking. Instead of showing the target temperature (and some symbols), show current temperature, target temperature, a plot that shows expected change and have this data refresh frequently (every second or so). Non-tech people have problems with such devices because they don't trust them; they can't trust something they don't understand, something which for them is doing god-knows what. They don't have a model in their head (and temperature is felt in a way that you can't always tell it's changing). So instead, let the machine show what it's doing and what is an expected outcome. People want to know the machine is doing the thing it's supposed to, so the machine should show that it is, in fact, doing it. A plot, or even a text that tells "current temperature: XX, target: YY, will stabilize at YY in 20 minutes" would be a good start.
> There is another immense insight to "electric house" movie that arguably the biggest impact of electricity to daily life is the microwave oven
I'd argue that those are, in order, washing machine, dishwasher and microwave oven; the former two save huge amounts of time for the person who would otherwise have to wash clothes/dishes by hand. But the bigger point stands - the most useful things are those that are considered... boring.
Maybe add a 'turbo' button too :-D
I still have all the z-wave stuff, including the thermostats, but sometimes they "die". When a z-wave light switch dies I replace it with an old school switch.
I'm not even going to get into the Nabaztag debacle. Door Stop.
It ended up being my best bet to buy a Green Building Advisor membership, watch some videos; and then seal up all the air leaks in the basement. Magic, a warm house with lower bills.
One day they stopped supporting it, and the whole thing became a brick. I couldn't even play CDs on it because it used to get the CD info online.
Today's IoT may barely work well on a good day, but wait for when a company drops support and you will be left with a brick.
It's from a small company and right now there's no other device that comes close to solving the problem I have, so I just grimaced and bought the thing.
How many times do you think this happens before the public wises up and the market corrects the issue? My answer is "not many".
One bricked item, or knowing someone with a bricked item, will change people's demands. Sort of like how it changed yours.
Answer: quite a lot apparently, since it keeps happening and people don't wise up, and it has reached the point where the behaviour described above is a standard practice (known as "exit"), and it's the reason many start a startup in the first place. Such people pretty much intend to screw their customers from day one, and apparently customers are happy to being screwed time after time.
I don't see this changing for hardware.
There was a recent story on HN about first generation Samsung smart fridges that stopped working correctly after a software update.
For those who thought that modern life wasn't easy or technology-filled enough without refrigerators that order stuff for you and thermostats you can control from your watch.
I'd love to have a unified way of accessing my sensors, devices, utilities, etc. for both better control, and better understanding, of my environment, my self, and how the two interact.
This trope has been around for hundreds of years.
The same is true for this retort.
The thing is, just because it has been said for "hundreds of years" doesn't mean it's always false when it's said.
It could be that (always false), of course. But it could also be partly true, e.g. pointing to a real loss that we suffered because of the infusion of technology in everyday life.
Here are some examples of technologically-caused issues that a lot of people, if not most, could do without: environmental damage due to modern mining, plastics, etc. Noise pollution. Cities designed around cars, that destroy the human scale and prevent the kind of relationships and urban life fostered by places like Manhattan, Vienna, Paris, etc. Technology as enabler of surveillance and loss of privacy. Military technology that can blow the world 10 times over. The same-ization of the world and the cheapening of cities due to global commerce, tourism, etc. Loss of quality time with friends and other people in the era of the smartphone. That one might point at improvements in other areas that offset these negatives/losses , doesn't mean there wasn't any loss in the first place.
A last possible case, regarding the original complaint, is that while it might be said for "hundreds of years" it could be especially true now. Just because people might claim it's midnight from early morning doesn't mean that it wont eventually be midnight.
And I'd argue that that's the case, myself.
If somebody complained about the prevalence of technology in the eighties (and several people did), predicting that it will get to a point that we'll be so depended on it, as to have cpus in every damn thing, including our keys, shoes, microwaves, etc, they would have told him that he fell for the "slippery slope" fallacy. Well, the Internet of Thing is the actual realization of that slippery slope.
Communicated using a network that wouldn't exist without modern mining and plastics, and using a machine that wouldn't exist without modern mining and plastics?
You could voluntarily give these things up. Indeed some communities (e.g. Amish) forsake some technologies. Instead you are using these technologies, enjoying them despite their ill effects, while claiming that most could do without them.
Probably missed the part where I wrote: "That one might point at improvements in other areas that offset these negatives/losses , doesn't mean there wasn't any loss in the first place"
Just because something (e.g. plastics) had a useful result, doesn't mean all of its results are useful, that it's sustainable in the long run (e.g. wont come back to bite us in the ass), or that it's currently used optimally.
Besides, one can still acknowledge some harm despite the fact that he himself uses what's harmful (e.g. I don't like that pigs are killed for it, but bacon is delicious). That's not "hypocritical", it's just weighting pros and cons.
And it's not like it's a black or white thing either. Acknowledging the harm makes us able to make decisions about how to improve things. E.g, to give an extreme example regarding your question, one could very well say: I'm ok with using plastics for important things like computers, but not with the tons of plastic garbage every year but making tons of disposable plastic BS from it (e.g. see the ban on plastic shopping bags in some places).
As for plastic, this is pretty much a miracle material and is absolutely not something we would like to do without. Yes, we could keep using wood and metal, but plastics are so much more awesome. There's a lot of reasons why we make everything from it.
Your point about slippery slopes is of course valid. Slippery slope is a fallacy until suddenly it isn't.
But frankly, the problem with IoT is not technology. Internet is fine, putting microcontrollers in stuff to optimize or enhance it is also fine. Pretty much every single issue with IoT is either greedy business strategy or dishonest marketing.
Also think about the implications of IoTs infrastructure + a modern dictatorship (or merely a government in bed with big corporations).
I also have this idea but all it takes is a totally fucked up tech event [1] to make people surviving it think "Yeah, tech was nice, but we might have been better off without much of it to begin with".
[1] E.g. "singularity apocalypse", nuclear war, a 4th Reich armed with modern surveillance capabilities, drones, fighting robots and IoT level reach, a huge ecological meltdown, etc. Suddenly technology's blessings like the ability to play "Legends of Zelda", send instant massages across the Atlantic and study new cancer drugs would look silly against billions dead.
Fair enough, though I thought about it for some time and came to the conclusion that if the government really wants to get you, they have so many possible avenues that you're screwed
I used to fear about modern humans being too dependent on the Internet itself, because 'till today it is not dependable - you don't have constant coverage, etc. But I don't have that fear anymore (of technology; I still fear our on-line dependence on private companies with shitty business models, whether there are corporations or startups) - I realized we depend on the Internet in the same way we (i.e. urban populations) depend on electricity, water mains, sewage treatment, food logistics and probably few other things I don't even realize I use. If a "totally fucked up tech event" happens on a global scale, people in big cities, like me, are totally and utterly fucked.
Our technology didn't simply make us dependent on it. It allowed us to flourish way over pure, natural capacity of our habitats. There is simply too many of us - an order of magnitude more than we can sustain with pre-industrial technology. There's no going back now, not without spilling lots of blood.
People seem to want autonomy. To live out of their own strength to greater and greater extent. It's probably hard-wired in our brains. But since rolling everything back to pre-industrial age isn't a reasonable option, there's only one other - push the progress harder. Our current support systems are too fragile, too easy to break to give people more autonomy. But it doesn't have to be that way, we can make them stronger, more resilient and more self-sustaining. I imagine and hope that one day the power grid and the Internet will be just another part of environment, like rivers and trees and rain. Something that will take care of itself so that we may individually take care of ourselves.
The problem I find is even when they don't really want to get you, you still suffer from the overextension of control.
What I mean is the lack of widespread and total control technology retains some "pockets of clean air" where people can be free -- in places and times outside total control.
Marijuana for example has been illegal for decades, but millions managed to smoke it -- because, although not perfectly safe from prosecution, it was however possible to do so without anyone noticing. Not so in a future with tens of sensors everywhere, automated substance tests, etc.
That's one example, and lots of people don't care about such a "freedom to roll one" anyway, but there are thousands of other activities that are or border on the illegal but have been nethertheless essential for our humanity, sense of freedom and culture.
Why not just call it "Internet" like we always have? Was it not made of "things" before?
I might want to tweet my poops, naturally; but what data does my butt need?
Yeah, but of things like routers, PC, smartphones etc.
Internet of Things is the BS idea of "internet of all the things" -- sensors and chips on your toaster, fridge, coke can, cat, hairpiece, ...
Every user here had problems with printing experience - bullshit crap "management" software that bloats the system, expected lifetime of a printer being around one year, hugely overpriced cartridges that have absurd DRMs (chips that just have a decrementing "time to stop working" counter is pure evil). Now expand that to every single electrical device you own. That is the Internet of Things - fly-by-night SaaS startup's wet dream incarnate.
It took me a while to realize the author was not living in the 80s, but talking about portable game consoles instead.
I have several devices which gives me useful data for quantified self proposes. I am also happy with my IP cameras and smart TV.
Like others, I would love to see these devices better secured. I would love them to be less cloud-dependant. But being like they are right now, they provide value.
What about TypeScript? What about "class" syntax in ES6? (who lobbied for it?) Microsoft still uses the same tactics. They tried it with JScript. Now they open source their JS and TS compatible engine and VS Code (contains mainly TS code).