How smart is the average smart home? Most of them enable homeowners to remotely control appliances, lighting, and thermostats, as well as distribute music seamlessly throughout the home, and improve security, among other feats that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade or two ago.
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How smart home tech might reshape human behavior
Artificial intelligence plus reinforcement learning could equal water conservation
But what if a smart home could actually influence the behavior of its occupants—for the better? What if it could help people develop more sustainable habits? This futuristic feature may actually be right around the corner.
In 2021, there were 258 million smart homes in the world. That figure is projected to surpass 350 million in 2023, and it will likely keep climbing. Given this global reach, if smart-home technology could actually influence human beings to behave more sustainably, it would be a valuable tool. It may help humanity combat some environmental challenges, including the impending threat of water scarcity. There are currently more than 2 billion people living in countries with inadequate water supplies. In the US, there’s a historic drought going on in the Southwest, and 40 out of 50 state water managers are bracing for shortages this decade.
How could smart technology help? The key to a smart home is artificial intelligence (AI), and the key to artificial intelligence is reinforcement learning. According to Beena Ammanath, author of Trustworthy AI, reinforcement learning is “how a machine learns by optimizing for the maximum rewards.” The AI learns through trial and error. When it makes a desired choice, the AI receives feedback in the form of a reward. It then sorts out how to make the “right” decisions to maximize its reward over time.
Homeowners are subject to reinforcement learning as well, taking in feedback from the smart-home tech and modifying behavior accordingly. It’s in the dynamic between the occupants and the smart home that the potential for change lies. Users could learn new habits, and increase their savings of valuable resources. Moen’s smart showers, for example, can be pre-set to preferred temperatures, so homeowners can step right into their ideal shower without waiting for water to heat up—a practice that wastes 280,000 gallons of water per day in the US, according to one estimate.
The feedback homeowners receive that could encourage sustainable behavior is called informational feedback. That could be the usage and cost of a resource such as water. Receiving that information can change habits, like seeing a high water bill and deciding to cut back, then and there (since feedback is in real time). There’s also comparative feedback, which shows a household’s use in a given month compared to previous months, and can influence homeowners to conserve. Comparative feedback becomes even more powerful if there’s an established norm in the mix. That is, if a smart home could show homeowners, say, the national average for households of their size, then the feedback would likely hit even harder, because research suggests that people feel compelled to keep their behavior in line with a group standard.
Even though smart-home AI is in its earliest stages of development, it already has features that can save resources. In addition to its smart showers, Moen has smart faucets that can dispense exact amounts of water for specific purposes, and heat them to precise temperatures. No more overflow when filling the baby’s bottle, or measuring two cups for baking. (And if your hands are messy with flour, you can use simple hand motions to control water flow and temperature, thanks to Moen’s new Motion Control feature.) While water-saving differences like these may seem trivial, that little bit of precision, spread across hundreds of millions of smart homes around the world, could make a real difference.
“We are barely scratching the surface with today’s smart-home technology,” says Ms Ammanath. She envisions a gaming element entering the technology at some point. “We love to engage with machines in a gaming format, where you are getting some kind of reward, whether it’s points or just encouragement,” for behaving in a sustainable way. Global water use increased at almost twice the rate of population growth in the 20th Century. So sustainability around water is key, and smart homes definitely have a role to play going forward.
Smart apps alone are not going to win the battle against global water scarcity. But given the challenge in front of us, we need every tool available. If the hundreds of millions of smart-home users started living even slightly more sustainably than they are now, we’d see real change for good.
