The Internet of things and its discontents
The current Consumer Electronics Show is full of even more gadgets that talk to each other about you. This isn’t necessarily an unmixed blessing
From the New Yorker
To find out, the scientists recruited more than five hundred British adults and asked them to imagine living in a house with three roommates. This hypothetical house came equipped with an energy monitor, and all four residents had agreed to pay equally for power. One half of the participants was told that energy use in the house had remained constant from one month to the next, and that each roommate had consumed about the same amount. The other half was told that the bill had spiked because of one free-riding, electricity-guzzling roommate.
From Buzzfeed
It’s not difficult to imagine a future in which similar data sets are wielded by employers, the government, or law enforcement. Instead of liberating the self through data, these devices could only further restrain and contain it. As Walter De Brouwer, co-founder of the health tracker Scanadu, explained to me, “The great thing about being made of data is thatdata can change.” But for whom — or what — are such changes valuable?
The lesson here is both that insulation and keeping up to the planning code really will help your energy problem, rather than just provide a better class of blame, and rockwool doesn’t talk.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »