The home of the future was always all about "push-button living." The industrial age's hallmark was a steady progression of labor-saving devices that let machines take over the toil and drudgery. In the future, we could luxuriate in our egg-shaped luminous plastic easy chair while meals were prepared, the house was cleaned, the dog walked, a cool drink was fetched, and the kids were entertained by marvelous machines that operate at the press of a button.
In some ways, this bright future was realized. Can you imagine actually getting up to change the channel on the TV or getting out of your car to open your garage door in the rain? In other cases, push-button living was never fully possible, or was, but only interesting for a small subset of consumers. Nevertheless, as automation technology has become cheaper and more effective, it's being installed more often, especially in high-end homes.
Today, many homeowners enjoy the ability to manage their lighting through automated scripts or by remote control. They can even set up "scenes," controlling several lights at once, and specifying individual dimness settings. You can even set your home's lights to "all off" for bedtime or "all on" if you hear a noise in the night. All this can be done either with inexpensive add-on hardware that communicates by piggybacking over your home's electrical wiring, or with much more sophisticated and expensive centralized lighting control systems. In the near future, the cheap option will certainly become better, and the more expensive option will become cheaper, so we're likely to see more "push button living" as time goes on.
Lighting isn't the only thing that can be automated. The home's thermostat can be connected to the same PC-based home automation system that manages the lighting scenes, and temperature can be adjusted according to your personal preferences as they relate to outdoor temperature and time of year. Various appliances can also be hooked up to this system, with the garage doors making sure they're closed each evening, the kids' TV being deactivated at eight each evening, or the coffee maker turned on each morning at seven.
It's not just about pushing buttons or writing scripts, either. Bill Gates' house is famous for recognizing occupants via a Radio Frequency ID system (think: EZ-pass) that they carry with them, and lights, music, even the artwork can be personalized for them in each room. This technology isn't readily available for normal folks, but there are some interesting hacks today that do similar things. For example, Mac users can download software called Salling Clicker that recognizes when you come near your computer by the Bluetooth signal from your cellphone, and might perform a series of tasks (check email, turn on music, log onto IM networks) when you arrive, and turn them all off when you leave. Whether it's Bluetooth from your phone or RFID tags embedded under your skin, many of today's futurists think that very soon many of our machines will be able to identify and authenticate us at short distances.
Of course, one of the favorite user interfaces from science fiction has always been voice control. On Star Trek, they just say "computer," and the ship does whatever they ask. Interestingly enough, voice recognition technology is now good enough and inexpensive enough that we're pretty far along in that area. There is even PC-based home automation software that can be completely controlled with voice commands, assuming that you have microphones and speakers set up in the rooms. If you don't, you can use any telephone in the home to talk to the system and tell it to heat up the hot tub, dim the lights to 30%, and put some Barry White on the sound system. Alternately, you could script all of those things to happen together by saying: "Computer – oooh yeah!"
Let's not forget the pinnacle of our modern era's realization of the fifties house-of-the-future dream: the personal housekeeping robot. Okay, so the Roomba isn't exactly Rosie from the Jetsons. But it's a start.
Home Monitoring and Protection
If, in the fifties, the future was to be all gleaming and robotic; by the seventies, we were a little more afraid it was going to look more like Soylent Green or the Omega Man. To protect your family and your possessions from food rioters and homicidal zombies, you'd need sophisticated technology in your home to secure it from thieves and intruders, and the rich would abscond themselves in exclusive guarded compounds. Well, I think we'll have to give the pessimists and the cyberpunks some credit: absence of zombies aside, many of their predictions about technology for home security and monitoring have become commonplace today.
Monitored home security systems with door and window sensors, motion sensors, glass break, smoke, fire, and carbon dioxide detectors all tied into a network that will alert the authorities in case of an alarm are now very common. Doors that open by remote control, and locks with codes that can be disabled if you fire the maid or break up with your boyfriend are now available and inexpensive. Security cameras, tied into your home entertainment system for display on home TVs, or hooked up to your computer for recording are now available at middle-class prices. Babies are now not only routinely monitored by special walkie-talkie devices, but frequently by wireless video cameras as well. You may not only speak to a guest at the front door via intercom, but even see who they are before you even answer (all the better to avoid salesmen and missionaries).
These systems, along with the home automation aspects discussed before, can also be hooked up to the internet, allowing your home to be monitored and controlled via a "home page" from anywhere with internet access. A visitor to your door could be routed to your cell phone, and could be let into the house with the push of a few buttons. In the near future, this kind of thing will probably become more common, especially for second homes.
High security apartment buildings and gated golf course communities are proliferating wildly in affluent areas, and although their security is probably mostly only of placebo value, even as crime continues to decline in the U.S., people like to feel set apart from the scary outside world. Home security and surveillance technology has helped them feel safer, whether or not they really are.
