One bitter winter decades ago, an oil tanker parked in my grandparents’ yard and filled up the heating oil tank beside the house. The driver left a bill that made my grandfather dizzy — The price of heating oil had spiked.
So Grandpa walked to his ancient thermostat and turned it down a bit. He didn’t mention it.
A few hours later, my grandma announced, “It’s getting chilly!” and put on a sweater.
Grandpa was relieved. “That’s what she should do,” he later told one of my cousins. “The sweater’s paid for.”
I thought of this story when Amazon announced that the new, artificial intelligence-powered Echo Hub will turn up your smart thermostat when you say, “Alexa, I’m cold.”
I find it odd that Amazon presented, and several news reports took, this as a hot new feature.
Never mind that this feature doesn’t require artificial intelligence — it’s a simple voice command like those Alexa has taken for years.
And never mind that this isn’t new — Google Nest products already allow you to give commands such as “Set the temperature to 72 degrees” or “Raise the temperature.”1
I can set those objections aside; Pretending that your product is more groundbreaking than it is? That’s marketing.
But I couldn’t help but wonder what this feature means for the way humans make decisions in the future. When we state a fact — “I’m cold” — and the technology around us takes action, it has made a decision for us. Why should its decision be to inefficiently heat an entire house because one person in one room is cold?
There are countless other options you could take when you feel the chill.
You can put on a paid-for sweater, like my grandma did. This can make you feel 5 degrees warmer.
You can warm a bowl of soup or a cup of your favorite hot beverage.
Working at the desk in your home office? Knock out the chill with a few minutes of a space heater pointed at your feet.
Is it close to bedtime? Read a book under the covers.
Or if you really want to turn up the thermostat, you could say, “Alexa, raise the temperature two degrees for the next hour.”
But Amazon has made it easy to get to this choice.
Imagine cranking up the volume on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (not a Christmas song!) at a party and your intelligent thermostat hears “It’s cold” dozens of times and cranks up the temperature to 90 degrees, and your electric bill up by a similar amount.
Meanwhile, all this heat you’re producing contributes to global warming as it relies on carbon-based power. Keep turning up the termostat, Alexa, and we might not need heat next winter.
I’m kidding (a little)
I’m not actually worried about this. Let’s not have a moral panic over this technological twist on the thermostat dial. I won’t judge you if you decide to tell Alexa you’re cold. You’re not obligated to freeze, even if it could save you 10 percent.
I’m also not concerned that “kids these days” will never learn how to work a manual thermostat or warm themselves up by chopping wood, turning us into a society of wimps. At worst, most people using this feature might be surprised by their heating bills for a couple of months and then grab a sweater.
But when technology makes a new task easy, we should consider why this is the default chosen by our techno overlords and whether it is the action we really want.
As Lena V. Groeger wrote for ProPublica, defaults matter:
Defaults (and their designers) hold immense power – they make decisions for us that we’re not even aware of making. Consider the fact that most people never change the factory settings on their computer, the default ringtone on their phones, or the default temperature in their fridge.
[Or their organ donor status, retirement contribution, or font, she adds.]
Someone, somewhere, decided what those defaults should be – and it probably wasn’t you.
Do you really want Alexa’s default reaction to your cold to be raising your electricity bill? Maybe so. But wouldn’t it be nice if Alexa would offer you a sweater?
Look for defaults around you
Technology sets countless defaults for us. Look at any device around you and think, “What does it do without me having to tell it?”
Smartphone apps come with default notification settings, which determine whether you will get interruptions on your schedule or theirs. You can opt out of these notifications.
Facebook, X, Apple News, or Google News will show you a certain feed of posts and stories by default, chosen by an algorithm not to inform you, but to keep you reading. You can choose, instead, to get your news from a variety of news websites, where you might find stories that no algorithm would give you by default.
There’s a famous quote that is often (by default) attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do—not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do has increased.”
Consider the inverse of that phrase: “That which becomes easier to do, we will persist in doing. Not that the desirability of the thing has changed, but that the power required to do it has decreased.”
As technology makes more and more default choices for us, it will affect how we spend our money and our time. It may affect who we meet and how we believe, vote, and treat others.
We need to remember to ask whether the new defaults are what we want. If the answer is no, it’s up to us to change the settings.
What would be a useful application of A.I. with thermostats? When you say, “Alexa, Grandma’s coming for a visit tomorrow,” and Alexa remembers Grandma got cold on the last visit. So it orders a sweater from Amazon, using analysis of the latest grandma fashions to deduce what outfit the sweater should match. And since the sweater won’t get here until day 2 of Grandma’s visit, it automatically raises the temperature on the first day until the sweater package is marked as “delivered”.