This is a Roomba.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a small robot that cleans floors — a small vacuum cleaner is inside it, and it randomly wanders over the floors of your house, sucking up dirt as it goes. It’s not a substitute for cleaning the floors, but it will stretch out the period between cleanings, and make cleaning faster when it does come. If you have a cat, the cat will most likely attempt to ride the robot, become startled, and it will be adorable.
This is a solar panel.
If you’re not familiar with it — say, because you’ve been living under a rock for the last twenty years — solar panels convert the suns light directly into electricity, and are often favored by environmentalists as a means of reducing your houses net carbon emissions. Although they aren’t market competitive yet, they’re rapidly reaching that point, and in the meanwhile, are the subject of many subsidies and grants.
What do these two technologies have in common?
They make something about your house easier. But they don’t really change your house at all.
You can’t run a house on just solar panels — that little detail of using power at night tends to get in the way. Your house still needs a grid connection, and will likely still face a power bill every month. Likewise, the robot just doesn’t do a good enough job to completely take humans out of the cleaning process. In both cases, the device is fundamentally passive. You interact with your house in exactly the same way you did before (using power and cleaning at regular intervals), the burden placed on you is just reduced — less cost for power or less time spent cleaning.
Like certain other things we’ve examined, these technologies do have a lot of potential to make the houses we live in today better. Lower power bills are as desirable as less household drudgery. But they don’t change the way you interact with, and live in, that building.
Negative criticism is always easy to write — we could list a lot of technologies that aren’t going to fundamentally change houses, but are still very worthwhile. Smart windows, high-efficiency bulbs, HVAC systems and more. A more interesting challenge is trying to list a technology that will have such an impact, this generations washing machine. Here at the Future Blog, we have a few ideas, but we’d like to hear our readers suggestions first.
What technologies do you think could fundamentally change houses? Leave a comment with your own ideas — and next week, we’ll cover your suggestions, along with our own answer.
You will need a grid hookup for load balancing, because solar panels are baseload (for an accessible introduction to the basic terminology of electricity generation, see this piece).
But there exist house designs which are net producers of usable energy for the grid, even after load balancing costs and other overhead. They don’t get a power bill every month. They get a power payment every month. Of course this does not usually cover the electricity cost of an electric car, which might put you back in the red on electricity but save you the gasoline bill.
More fundamentally, I would question the implicit idea of fundamental discontinuities in technological development. The very early Internet really didn’t do anything that a fax machine and a phone would not do if you coaxed them a bit. It just did it faster, cheaper and better. The washing machine does not fundamentally alter the process of doing laundry – it just does it faster and cheaper and (occasionally) better.
Technological development, in my view, is a fundamentally iterative process: You create tools that are a little more sophisticated, to do the same job you did yesterday a little faster, or a little cheaper or a little better. Then you find new and interesting uses for your new tool. And once you are convinced that the interesting new use is more than an idle curiosity, you build more refined, more dedicated tools to do what you are now “already doing.” Just a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper or a little bit better.
Technological progress is firmly rooted in the mundane drudgery of present technology. An industrial culture forgets this fact at the peril of shortly ceasing to be an industrial culture.