🔗 Smart tech — smart for whom?

Earlier today I quipped on social media: “We need dumb tech and smart users, and not the other way around”.

Later, I clarified that I’m not calling users of “smart” devices dumb. People are smart. The tech should try to not “dumb them down” by acting condescendingly, cutting down on their agency and limiting their opportunities of education.

A few people shared replies to the effect that they wish for smart devices that wouldn’t be at odds with the intents of the user. After all, we all want the convenience of tech, so why settle for “dumb tech”, right?

The question here becomes a game of words: what is a “smart device”, after all?

A technically-minded person will would look at smart devices like smartphones, smart TVs, etc., and say “well, they are really computers”, or “they have computers inside”. But if we want to be technically pedantic, what is a computer? Having a Turing-complete microprocessor running programs? My old trusty microwave for sure has a microprocessor, but it’s definitely not a “smart device”. So it’s not about the internals, it definitely has to do with the end-user perception of the device.

The next reasonable approximation towards a definition is that a smart device allows you to install “apps”. You can extend it with more functionality (which is really making use of the fact that it’s a “computer inside”). Smart TVs and smart phones check this box. However, other home appliances like “smart kettles” don’t, the “smartness” comes from being internet-connected. So, generally, it looks like smart devices are things you either run apps in, or control via apps (from another smart device, of course).

So, allowing for running apps pretty much makes something into a computer, right? After all, a computer is a machine for running software. But it’s really interesting to think what is in fact a computer — where do we draw the line. From an end-user perspective, a game console is also a machine for running software — a particular kind of software, games — but it is not a computer. Is a Smart TV a computer? You can install apps in it. But they are also generally restricted to a certain kind of software: streaming services, video and the like.

Something doesn’t feel like a computer unless you can run any kind of software in it. This universality is a key concept. It’s interesting how we’re slowly driven back to the most fundamental definition of a computer, Alan Turing’s definition of a computer as a universal machine. Back in 1936, before the first actual computer was built during World War II, Turing wrote a philosophy section within a mathematics paper where he made this thought exercise of what it means to compute, and in his example he used the idea of a person doing the computations by hand: reading data, applying rules to process data, producing new data, repeat. Everything that computes follows this model: game consoles, the autopilot in an airplane, PCs, the microcontroller in my microwave. And though Turing had a technical notion of universality in mind, the key point for us here is that in our end-user understanding of a computer and what makes us call some things computers and others not, is that the program (or set of allowed programs) is not fixed, and this is what we see (and Turing saw) as universal: that any program that may be expressed in the computer’s language can be written and run on it, not just a finite set.

Are smart devices universal machines, then, in either sense of the word? Well, you can install new apps in them. Then, it can do new things it couldn’t yesterday. Does that make it a computer? What about game consoles? If I buy a new game (which is effectively new software!), it can also do new things, but you won’t really look at it as a computer. The reason is because you’re restricted on the kind of new software you can make this machine run: it only takes games, it’s not universal, at least from an end-user point of view.

But game consoles are getting “smarter” nowadays! They not only play games; maybe it will also have an app for showing you the weather, maybe it will accept some streaming service… but not others — and here we’re hinting at a key point of what “smart” devices are really like. They are, in fact, on the inside, universal machines that satisfy Turing’s definition. But they are not universal machines for you, the owner. For me, my Nintendo Switch is just a game console. For Nintendo, it is a computer: they can install any kind of software in it in their next software update. They can decide that it can play games, and also access Youtube, but not Netflix. Or they could change their mind tomorrow. From Nintendo’s perspective, the Switch is a universal machine, but not from mine.

The same thing happens, for example, with an iPhone. For Apple, it is a computer: they can run anything on it, the possibilities are endless. From the user’s perspective, it is a phone, into which you can install apps, and in fact choose from a zillion apps in the App Store. But the the possibilities, vast as they may be, are not endless. And that vastness doesn’t help much. From a user perspective, it doesn’t matter how many things you can do with something; what matters are what things you want to do with it, which of those you can and which ones you can’t. Apple still decrees what’s allowed and what isn’t in the App Store, and will also run their own software on the operating system, over which you have zero say. A Chromecast may also be a computer on the inside, with all the necessary networking and video capabilities, but Google has decided that it won’t let me easily play my movies with it, and so it can’t, just like that.

And such is the reality of smart devices. My Samsung TV is my TV, but it is Samsung’s computer. My house is filled, more and more, with computers over which I have no control. And they have control over what I can and what I can’t do with the devices I bought. From planned obsolescence, to collecting data on my habits and selling it, to complicating access to functionality that is there — the common thread in smart devices is that there is someone on the other side controlling the experience. And as we progress towards the “ever smarter”, with AI-based voice assistants being added to more devices, a significant part of that experience becomes the ways it “delights and surprises you“, or, in other words, your lack of control of it.

After all, if it wasn’t surprising, if it did just what you expected and nothing more, it wouldn’t be all that “smart”, right? If you take all the “smartness” away, what remains is a “dumb” device, an empty shell, waiting for you to tell it what to do. Press a button to do the thing, and the thing happens. Don’t press, it doesn’t do the thing. Install new functionality, the new functionality is installed. Schedule it to do the thing, it does when scheduled, like a boring old alarm clock. Use it today, it runs today. Put it away, pick it up to use it ten years from now, it runs ten years from now. No surprise upgrades. No surprises.

“But what about the security upgrades”, you ask? Well, maybe I just wanted to vacuum my living room. Can’t we design devices such that the “online” component isn’t an indispensable, always-on necessity? Of course we can. But then my devices wouldn’t be their computers anymore.

And why do they want our devices to be their computers? It’s not to run their software in it and free-ride on our electricity bill — all these companies more enough computers of their own than we can imagine. It’s about controlling our experience. Once the user has control over which software runs, they make the choices. Once they don’t, the choice is made for them. Whenever behavior that used to be user-controlled becomes automatic in a “smart” (i.e., not explicitly user-dictated) way, that is a way where a choice is taken away from you and driven by someone else. And they might hide choices behind “it was the algorithm”, which gives a semblance of impersonality and deniability, but putting the algorithm in place is a deliberate act.

Taking power away from the user is a deliberate act. Take social networks, for example. You choose who to follow to curate your timeline, but then they say “no, we want our algorithm to choose who to display in your timeline!”. Of course, this is always to “delight” you with a “better experience”; in the case of social networks, a more addictive one, in the name of user engagement. And with the lines between tech conglomerates and smart devices being more and more blurred, the effect is such that this control extends into our lives beyond the glass screens.

In the past, any kind of rant like this about the harmful aspects of any piece of tech could well be responded with a “just don’t use it, then!” In the world of smart devices, the problem is that this is becoming less of an option, as the fabric of our social and professional lives increasingly depends on these networks, and soon enough alternatives will not available. We are still “delighted” by the process, but just like, 15 years in, a smartphone is now just a phone, soon enough a smart kettle will be just a kettle, a smart vacuum will be just a vacuum and we won’t be able to clean our houses unless Amazon says it’s alright to do so. We need to build an alternative future, because I don’t want to go back to using a broom.