Some see a regular Jetsonian future of, if not jetpacks and flying cars, at least homes integrated seamlessly with a networked world. Others see the demands as too low and the challenges too high to expect any but incremental changes.
The report, part of the Future of the Internet/Imagining the Internet series, surveyed "1,021 experts and analysts from the tech world, universities, government agencies, corporations, and other stakeholders" on how close we are to a "smart" world, one which uses energy-efficient “smart structures,” integrated appliances and automobiles and “smart grids” that enable a more efficient delivery of electricity and water.
Comme ci, comme ça
"The result was a fairly even split," said Janna Anderson, director of Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, "between those who agreed that energy- and money-saving 'smart systems' will be significantly closer to reality in people’s homes by 2020 and those who said such homes will still remain a marketing mirage."
Fifty-one percent of respondents agreed with this statement in the survey:
By 2020, the connected household has become a model of efficiency, as people are able to manage consumption of resources (electricity, water, food, even bandwidth) in ways that place less of a burden on the environment while saving households money. Thanks to what is known as "smart systems," the Home of the Future that has often been foretold is coming closer and closer to becoming a reality.
Forty-nine percent agreed with the opposing statement:
By 2020, most initiatives to embed IP-enabled devices in the home have failed due to difficulties in gaining consumer trust and because of the complexities in using new services. As a result, the home of 2020 looks about the same as the home of 2011 in terms of resource consumption and management. Once again, the Home of the Future does not come to resemble the future projected in the recent past.
On the pro side was David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “Homes will get more efficient because it will cost more and more to waste energy," he said. "The devices will become simpler because no one likes being outsmarted by their thermostat."
The skeptics included Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Communications and Society Program at the Aspen Institute. “Smart homes are on their way, but this development is being delayed—not so much by lack of trust as by lack of alignment of the key players—utilities, ISPs, manufacturers.”
The future is now!
Cisco predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices in 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, the report reminds us. The rush to embrace the "Internet of Things" has been great in the past several years, for, among other reasons, the way integrated devices can keep constant track of their user's habits, one of the most valuable coins currently in circulation. IBM, for instance, has over 2,000 projects in its "Smarter Planet" initiative.
Sensors in consumer products like wine track deliveries and help tighten logistics. From rice cookers to cattle tags, small bits of the Web are talking to each other, or that's the cant at any rate. And yet less than half of Americans own smartphones.
The notion that people in general would want an integrated home is an appealing one to people who are personally inspired by the excitement of technological potential—even moreso perhaps to the people who stand to make serious cash out of the deal, companies like Panasonic (whose rice cooker can allegedly get recipes from your Android), Cisco (who makes the networking tech), IBM (who is selling sensors and consulting to governments from Dubuque to Rio) and General Electric (who is working on networked hospital suites). But many people want their homes to remain an island of stability and, well, hominess.
"People don’t seem to want this stuff very much," said Tracy Rolling, product user-experience evangelist (seriously?) for Nokia. "They like for their homes to be dumb. How many people do you know who have bought one of those alarm-clock coffee pots, loved them for a month, and then stopped using the alarm-clock feature all together? Smart homes are like that on a grand scale.”
The future is... well, mostly it's still now
Many of the respondents to the survey outlined structural impediments to the creation of integrated home/appliance/energy systems.
"Barriers include... economic weakness, economic uncertainties, building codes, lack of standardization, lack of oversight/regulation (which actually leads to an atmosphere of business confidence), lack of tested, mature technologies, and resistance from entrenched technologies,” said Donald G. Barnes, visiting professor at Guangxi University in China, formerly director of the Science Advisory Board at US Environmental Protection Agency.
"Proprietary technology and a lack of organized protocols and formats means that this is not going to take off for a very, very long time," added Rolling.
Some respondents did believe the future holds some whiz-kid surprises for householders, but even they qualified those expectations. It will be a long time until such networks are financially viable, some said. Others mentioned the "gremlins" that get into even the best-made systems as those systems grow in complexity.
If a "home of the future" ever does become a reality, one worry could be that the same thing will happen at home that happened in the University of Colorado system. When the Internet caved in for well over a week during finals, some professors experienced a perfect storm of technological dependency and technological ignorance (they couldn't do their job without the technology but they had not backed up a thing they did).