A bold claim, but I would wager, in the majority of cases, an accurate one.
I refer, of course, to doorbells. Wireless, internet enabled, internet-of-things doorbells. Not those simple press-a-button, hit-a-bell arrangements. Or a Neanderthal, one-moving-part door knocker.
Oh no, a proper lights-up-your-smartphone twenty-first century visitor-alerter. Space age, if the space age wasn’t all gas guzzlers with phallic fins and gills, buzzcuts and pork pie hats, church burnings and lynchings.
Buy cheap, buy twice, as the saying goes. Which is exactly what I did, hence the need to buy my second whizzy doorbell. The first was a £70 or so Amazon purchase. The instructions appeared to have been translated via Martian and needed to be pondered over like deep poetry to extract meaning. It worked well initially, even if speaking to visitors was somewhat fiddly – by the time you’d worked out what to press and whether to keep it pressed when talking or listening (still can’t remember) they’d invariably have gone, leaving you with a summons to the sorting office. I did manage a conversation whilst wandering around a harbour with a person looking to buy the car parked outside my house. Which wasn’t my car. I was happy to negotiate, nonetheless.
But it drained our batteries, and at some point the ability to converse fell off; when it rang we’d simply go to the front door rather than ‘answer’ it on our phones. When we were out we rarely had the app on. It had evolved back into a simple press-and-it-rings doorbell. And then, after our teenaged IT department decided to unilaterally reset our router (or do I mean hub? how are they different? or are they the same thing?) it stopped working altogether.
I did a lot of research into a replacement. There are a few more providers out there than previously. My doorbell, which appeared in almost identical guise under a number of different names, is no longer on the market. Nest and Ring dominate, as they did before, but I didn’t like the need to subscribe to services to get full functionality out to them last time and nothing had changed on that front as far as I was concerned. The one genuinely new bell or whistle out there seemed to be facial recognition software.
Let’s just pause and unpack that for a moment. Facial recognition software. Your doorbell’s pressed and your smartphone rings and shows you the view from a camera at your doorstep. And at the same time, it uses software to measure distances between eyes, mouth, nose, whatever, to tell you who’s at the door. Even though you’re looking at the image that it’s seeing as well. Even though you’ve evolved over aeons to be able to recognise faces. It’s something the average human is stunningly good at.
I don’t think it tells you who it is if you don’t know them; it’s not plugged into Langley or the Pentagon or anything. That could be genuinely useful. Neither does it pop the locks when it recognises your phizog, though that would be a small step away. As would be getting cleared out by that twin that you fell out with and no longer talk to.
My understanding is that it uses your previous visitors, who you have to tag or identify somehow, presumably, to tell you who’s here, now. Even though we can tell just by looking. It’s like a dog standing on its hind legs. Why do we need it?
I've come to a number of alternative conclusions. One is that it's not about Langley telling you who's at the door, but you telling Langley. Facial recognition is the facet of the informational revolution that people are only whispering about. You've heard of Facebook, but have you heard of DeepFace? The Chinese government plans to be able to identify “anyone, anytime, anywhere in China within three seconds”. Think about it, your own private property is where they can't scan your face. Unless you do it for them.
But, perhaps, even more fundamentally for the species there’s a working assumption that we’re all going to give up recognising faces. Yes, it’s a skill that we’re so adept at that we’ve virtually forgotten how great we are at it. But, hey, there’s an app for that, so free up some bandwidth and hand over the responsibility for facial recognition to Apple, Google, Huawei or whoever. I know that I’ve written on the theme of outsourcing mental abilities if not common sense to the machines in our hands, on our laps, on our desks before. But this is plain silly. We’ve arrived at a genuine, full–on reductio ad absurdum.
I’m willing to concede that the view from the top of a slippery slope is likely to be magnificent. And the journey may be initially pleasant before the speed builds up and you see yourself hurtling towards the edge of the abyss. Hold on tight, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
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