smart futures = crap futures
Smart is a key word in the crap-future makers community. Everything will become smart. You just need to put a chip in it.
But what does this overused word actually mean?
When we talk about a ‘smart’ person we’re usually referring to someone:
a. well-dressed, tidy of appearance (‘sharp’ in the US)
b. clever or intelligent (often good at maths, etc.) or quick-witted (again, ‘sharp’)
As an adjective applied to a person, ‘smart’ does not describe all aspects of that person. Someone who is smart at maths might be terribly unsmart socially (not to mention poorly dressed). Moreover, ‘smart’ is not a term we use lightly - when we describe someone as smart we tend to mean it, and we set the bar high.
When we shift from thinking about people to thinking about products, however, the bar drops considerably. ‘Smart’ gets confused with other adjectives, like ‘automated’ or ‘efficient’. So we get:
smart (automated) toaster
These examples mechanise basic tasks, placating simple desires (efficiently).
Automation does, admittedly, operate on different levels of smart:
Guiding a bomb is quite complex and the system developed to achieve this is perhaps capable of performing better than a human. But is it ethically smart? Likewise the automated car - indeed, it is very smart mechanically and computationally. But socially? Experientially? Ecologically?
As with children, we are often guilty of being too generous when we use the word ‘smart’. We use it to describe automation + a variety of different traits.
> charm, personality, communicability
Anthropomorphised, pedomorphised, or zoomorphised versions of automation.
Knowing what we want and making it happen. The ‘perfect butler’ idea.
Eventually, says Mary Walker, of IBM’s home automation division, ‘smart ID’ chips will be implanted inside you. Then ‘your body temperature might give your stereo system cues as to your mood and it would select appropriate music’ …
Automating your well-being. Nagging you to be a better person, or just going ahead and making your choice for you.
… the chip could also ‘compute how much of your body weight is fat, and offer suggestions for diet recipes to the refrigerator’.
- Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2004)
Then there is the problem of the generic user of these smart objects, who is overwhelmingly young, wealthy, male - a smug bachelor in his perfect glass cage.
Those are some of the problems. So how can we begin to develop a new smart? Here are a few ideas to get started:
Real users. What does the smart home for a three-generation family - unharmonious, unwealthy, complicated - look like?
Or how about a rethink of ‘smart’ with provocative counter versions:
Smart = slow - as in slow food; not automated microwave crap but immersive, complex, engaging, experiential.
Smart = surprising - no banal predictions (automatically turning the lights on), or crappy personalities (C-3PO meets smart home). How about Obi-Wan Kenobi calming intoning ‘you will be perfectly cooked’ to a side of beef, or Peter Cook shouting ‘you c**t!’ when you drop a cup?
Smart = reacting to more complex things:
It’s always interesting to watch a psychotropic house try to adjust itself to strangers, particularly those at all guarded or suspicious. The responses vary, a blend of past reactions to negative emotions, the hostility of the previous tenants …
- J.G. Ballard, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
As usual, Bradbury predicted our dilemma with the Happylife Home - in the future we go on holiday to avoid automation.
‘Why don’t we shut the whole house down for a few days and take a vacation?’
‘You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?’
‘Yes.’ A frantic watery-eyed nodding.
- Ray Bradbury, ‘The Veldt’ (1951)
And Baudrillard, who asked: How can automatic be smart if it makes us simple spectators?
… when it becomes automatic (on the other hand) its function is fulfilled, certainly, but it is also hermetically sealed. Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator.
