Is your technology solution a well behaved house guest?

‘How many devices do you have in your home connected to the Internet? One? Three? Five?’

It was 2010. I was attending an internal conference within the technology department of a large bank. The leader of the digital team was illustrating the rapid expansion of the Internet, and the importance of digital customer experience.

Most people put their hands up to show that they owned a few connected devices. Most put their hands down by the time the count rose to five.

I considered my answer to the question. I had a work laptop in my bag. I had an iPhone and a work Blackberry. I had two PCs at home with a broadband connection. My wife had an iPhone too. We had six connected devices in our house (sometimes). I was at the top end of the spectrum; perhaps I even counted as an early adopter!

I occasionally think back to this event when I look at the desk in my study, and contemplate the array of screens, cables and chargers that cover it today. These days I easily exceed five devices without even leaving my physical desktop. If I count the total number of connected devices in my home then I get into dozens, and I know that I am forgetting some. My wife and I don’t have children: if we did, I am sure that would add even more.

This rising count shows that the speaker at that conference was right. They were describing the shallow part of the exponential curve, a curve whose gradient has continued to rise. The importance of providing customers with a high quality, reliable digital experience continues to increase.

However, the shift in the technology in my home has been qualitative as well as quantitative. I don’t just have more devices: those devices have much more capability than they had before. The desktop PC I had in 2010 was pretty crude by today’s standards: it didn’t have a camera or a microphone unless I bought and installed them separately. It didn’t interact with anything else in my house. My wifi and mobile signals were relatively weak, and parts of my house were untouched by my network.

By contrast, today’s devices can see me, hear me and talk to me. They can turn my lights and heating on and off. I can use my most sophisticated devices (my phone, my tablet, my laptop) to access and control many aspects of my life: my connections with other people, my finances, my work. These are all choices I have made, but I have to confess that I don’t remember consciously making all of them. It is convenient that my bank account, which used to live in my branch and send me a letter from time to time, now seems to live in my pocket - but I don’t recall inviting my bank home with me.

I think that the increasing sophistication and penetration of technology into our home lives places profound obligations on those of us who work in technology. We should remember that the solutions that used to live in our offices, are now out customers’ house guests, and we should make sure that they behave like house guests: they should be unobtrusive, polite, discrete and reliable. They should not go where they are not invited - and they should leave when they are no longer welcome.

Recently, the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has triggered increased focus on its ethical implications, prompting companies to develop principles, codes of practice and frameworks, and otherwise embrace the concept of what is coming to be known as Responsible AI. This is a good thing, but I don’t think we should limit ourselves to AI: as we develop these principles, we should ask whether we have consistently followed them in the development of other technologies which have penetrated our lives. Billions of people have invited new house guests to stay: as technologists we should continuously ask ourselves whether we deserve that welcome.

(Views in this article are my own.)