Within a few minutes of arriving at the WIRED offices in San Francisco, Matic cofounder Mehul Nariyawala brings up the classic Paul Graham piece on schlep blindness. The essay talks about how engineers will often shrink away from starting a company to tackle a very commonly understood problem simply because solving that problem would require too much work. They don't want to schlep, so they put aside the world-changing idea and instead just go build something easy. We're watching the prototype, Matic, slowly work out whether the color differentiations of the concrete floor in the WIRED offices actually signal whether it's moving from hardwood to carpet. I ask Nariyawala why so many startups compete to create a self-driving car when the problem of creating a simple, effective, yet affordable robot vacuum is right there waiting to be solved.

Today, Nest announced the newest addition to its product line: a security camera called Nest Cam Outdoor. The camera's weatherproof industrial design is slick, but it's the software that has the potential to win over new customers--in particular, how the system manages footage. Using artificial intelligence, the camera sniffs out potential security threats rather than blindly sending notifications anytime something insignificant (or not) passes in front of it. In short, the camera aims to be a human sentry in gadget form. "It watches and hears everything, but it only tells you the salient information," Mehul Nariyawala, project manager of cameras at Nest, says.