A.I. will make smart homes autonomous, but don't expect perfection or privacy

In today's smart home, a weekday routine might have the alarm clock going off at 7 a.m., the shades raising, the thermostat turning up the heat a few degrees, and the lights turning on in the bathroom. But these scheduled tasks aren't much help on a morning when you have to wake up an hour earlier to catch a flight, unless your hub has access to your calendar and is smart enough to trigger your wake-up sequence at 6 a.m. Here's the question: Should your hub be able to ask you first? One of the big questions with smart home technology is, "how much of this should be user-driven versus A.I.-driven?" said Mark Spates, Google's product lead for smart home, during his keynote talk at the 2018 Connections Conference in San Francisco on May 22. And, in order to get to the level where devices start to act like the user without any input, the reliability has to be 100 percent, something that's currently not happening, he said. How much of the smart home should be user-driven versus A.I. driven?