Smart Everything Isn’t Necessarily a Good Thing


All those smart devices seem to have taken the next step. Whether for good or bad is a matter of opinion though. With the falling price of sensors, almost every item can be fitted with one. Add a piece of software, often free, and you could be “seeing social engineering disguised as product engineering”. Huh? Take BinCam, a good old trash bin fitted with a smartphone on the top lid. When you drop stuff into the bin, it takes a pic, sends it to Mechanical Turk where freelancers check if your garbage proves whether or not you really care for the environment! And eventually, your photo appears on your Facebook page…to shame you.

At least the BinCam is voluntary, you might say. And the idea is positive: to shame you into being better. Similar ideas include smart scales that tweet your weight online to add pressure on you to stick to that diet; smart medicine bottles that ping you and your doc if you aren’t taking that medication; smart forks that tell you are eating too fast and smart toothbrushes that tell you to brush for longer.

And then there’s the potential that all this smartness goes over to the dark side. Like that smart sensor in the car that warns that you are driving too fast or braking too hard can also tomorrow transmit the info to the insurance company. Who may then jack up your premium. Who’s to say that once a critical mass of such drivers is reached that we won’t find insurance companies penalizing drivers who don’t have such sensors? It’s a slippery slope to Big Brother, isn’t it?

Which is why Evgeny Morozov defines “good smart” where you only get suggestions but are still free to do what you want and “bad smart” which practically makes certain choices impossible. When John Stuart Mill wrote these lines in On Liberty:
“the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right”
he was talking about governments. Today we may be standing on the brink of Big Data and companies being able to do the same. And Mill’s arguments would apply equally against corporations as well, wouldn’t it?

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