Cantillon: Meet Hal, your 21st-century personal assistant

For anyone old enough to remember 2001: A Space Odyssey, now might be the time to reconsider moving to that cabin in the woods, with no phone connection or electricity. Because your home is about to become almost sentient, thanks to the combined efforts of Google and Amazon.

We’re about to throw open the doors of our homes to devices that can control everything around us, and we don’t seem to be that concerned about the power it gives away.

Both companies now offer voice-controlled speakers that can take control over the basic smart home functions.

But Google has the potential to make it just a little creepier. We’ll give the firm the benefit of the doubt. We’re sure it’s not the company’s intention to know a scary amount of detail about its users’ lives. But it does. Where you live, where you work, what your voice sounds like. What spam lists you’ve been signed up to. Every place you’ve asked for directions to since you started signing in to Google maps.

And now, add Google Home to the mix.

Google Home uses artifical intelligence – Google Assistant – to learn about users: what they like and dislike, what they need at different types of the day. It could either be the best friend you’ll ever have, or a slightly creepy, stalkerish device that knows far more about you than it should.

But this isn’t just about Google Home; it’s merely the latest in a long line of products that are designed to make our homes smarter by connecting them to the internet.

It’s all part of the internet of things, the march towards connecting devices online in a bid to make them more useful, more convenient and take a lot of the dull, repetitive work away from humans.

It all sounds like a great idea. But it’s not as simple as that. There’s a sinister side to the internet of things. Take the recent attack on security writer Brian Krebs’ website. It was the biggest DDOS attack ever recorded, with the attackers using a web of IoT devices to carry it out. A report on the incident blamed security cameras and DVRs with basic passwords for the attack.

Basic passwords, in this instance, meant ones that were never changed from the easily guessed default, or were something simple like “password” or “admin”.

At the end of the day, the smart home and all its devices is only as smart as the person using it. The weak link in the chain is the human element – and that’s one that we may not be able to fix for the forseeable future.