Stewart Brand: prediction

Transcript context

…You’ve said a good deal about architecture. Do you view the forthcoming smart home as a blessing or a curse? It’s always been a curse. The internet of things is making stuff a lot more convenient and a lot more handy, but people are banging away on making homes smart for decades and decades. I think that one of the things we’ll be figuring out increasingly for the next few decades is, what things to hand over to robots and what things not to, and there’ll be lots of stuff that surprises us. It’s just great that robots are doing that. Frankly, I love the autopilot on the Tesla drive. I don’t use it to get all the way from here to there. I use it so I don’t have to pay close attention to traffic, just peripheral attention, and the difference there is fantastic. But trying to get a whole bunch of things coordinated around shortcut convenience — that is a long cut to finally program it all so that it works. It winds up like those remote clickers for television. They have too many buttons, and people finally learn the three buttons that do what they mainly want and pay no attention to the rest. Then the younger members of the family sort them all out and become adept at it, and then the next generation of excessive choices comes along, and they don’t know, and they’ve got to ask their kids how the hell does this complex thing work. I think there’s an endless quest for complete handiness, and I think, generally, people who go for simplicity rather than robotized complexity in terms of personal living are happier. If we, in proper Hayekian fashion, want more of an organically evolving architecture, what can we do to get there?…

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