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@@ -44,9 +44,9 @@ Here is a future in which the wake word becomes something we do, a situation, en |
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Of the many things the pandemic has clarified, one is that aged care homes are a microcosm worth paying attention to. By August 2020, 68% of Australia's Covid-related deaths were residents of aged care. In the UK, aged care residents are dying at three times the "normal rate". No surprise then that aged care is also a laboratory for smart homes and smart cities. |
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Elderly relatives are monitored like Tomagotchi pets in Google Home patents. Systems send out suggestive prompts at opportune moments, reminding you to "Give your mother a call." Across the spectrum of this technological imaginary, from nursing homes to nurseries, care is automated, accident averted, and human touch is always the last resort. When ambient assisted living is generalized, it slips out of the the retirement village like a fog: it is the becoming retirement village of the world. |
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In Google Home patents, elderly relatives are monitored like Tomagotchi pets. Systems send out suggestive prompts at opportune moments, reminding you to "Give your mother a call." Across the spectrum of this technological imaginary, from nursing homes to nurseries, care is automated, accident averted, and human touch is always the last resort. When ambient assisted living is generalized, it slips out of the the retirement village like a fog: it is the becoming retirement village of the world. Or as Amazon now calls it: Alexa Residential [ref]. |
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Google knows you can get away with things in assisted living facilities that you couldn't in the city outside. Or not yet anyway. Nursing homes and their residents are already socially isolated, already underfunded, already sites of exploitation and abuse: ready and waiting for a magic bullet offered out of the goodness of some billionaire's heart. This is a context in which companies can proclaim in all seriousness that "Continuous monitoring offers greater privacy," where automated care and the total surveillance it entails justifies the absence of human care as a new feature: *greater privacy* [ref website]. |
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Big tech knows you can get away with things in assisted living facilities that you couldn't in the city outside. Or not yet anyway. Nursing homes and their residents are already socially isolated, already underfunded, already sites of exploitation and abuse: ready and waiting for a magic bullet offered out of the goodness of some billionaire's heart. This is a context in which companies can proclaim in all seriousness that "Continuous monitoring offers greater privacy," where automated care and the total surveillance it entails justifies the absence of human care as a new feature: *greater privacy* [ref website]. |
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For such an ambient sensing environment to work, this very environment must be designed and shaped with embedded cameras and microphones in mind. Every room becomes a studio. Background noise must be minimized to make objects and sounds a little more legible. And we know that such environmental design doesn't stop at objects and spaces: it reshapes our own patterns of speaking and living as we learn to enunciate with a cadence, accent and tone that an algorithm can understand. |
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