Smart buildings: What happens to our free will?

SMART buildings are a new generation of buildings in which technological devices, such as sensors and other non-conscious cognitive systems, are embedded in the structure of the buildings themselves. Smart buildings promise to personalise the experiences of their occupants by using real-time feedback mechanisms and forward-looking management of interactions between humans and the built environment fuelled with artificial intelligence. In a not-so-distant future, this process might involve augmented reality (AR) devices, such as AR glasses currently under development by major technology companies (eg Apple, Google, Meta). 

Experiential customisation in the built environment supposes continuous monitoring of the activities of occupants and the use of sophisticated profiling models. While these issues spark concerns about privacy and data transparency, the questions raised by the massive arrival of digital technologies in our living spaces go far beyond this.

Thanks to ubiquitous computing, interactions between building occupants and embedded technology are quiet and invisible. As a result, the occupants’ attention is never drawn to the massive presence of computers operating permanently in the background.

Personalisation allows us, for example, to always have the ideal temperature and brightness in our workspace at all times. This would be idyllic if this personalisation did not come at a cost to the occupants, namely their freedom of action and, more fundamentally, their free will.

As technology increasingly mediates our experiences in the built environment, choices will be offered to us, or even imposed on us, based on the profile the building’s technology device models have created of us in function of the goals, mercantile or otherwise, of those who control them.

Having the ability to decide either to do something or not, and to act accordingly, is a basic definition of freedom in space. Smart buildings challenge this freedom by interfering with our ability to act and, more fundamentally, with our ability to decide for ourselves. Is freedom of action even possible for the occupants of a building where interactions between humans and their built environment are produced using algorithms that are never neutral ?

Satisfied... but not free 

The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke’s famous analogy of the locked room sheds light on this question. Suppose a sleeping man is transported to a room where, upon awakening, he is engaged in activities that bring him great satisfaction, such as chatting with a long-lost friend.

Unbeknown to him, the door of the room is locked. Thus, he cannot leave the room if he wants to. He is therefore not free, even though he voluntarily remains in the room and gets extreme satisfaction from what he is doing there.

Locke’s analysis reflects the situation of smart buildings occupants. They benefit from the personalisation of their experiences from which they derive great satisfaction. However, once they enter a space, technology controls their interactions outside of their awareness. While they may want to stay in the building to enjoy personalised experiences, they are not free. Smart buildings are a high-tech version of Locke’s locked room.

Deciding on the role of technology in our living spaces 

Besides, what can be said about our free will when choices are made for us by technology?

An action is something we do actively, as opposed to things that happen to us in a passive way. Also, the active will to perform an action differs from the passive desire for an act to be done.

While algorithms are concerned with the predictability of human behaviour, things happen passively to the occupants of smart buildings. Their role is limited to receiving stimuli while the invisibility of the technology maintains their illusion that they have sole control over their actions.

These human-built environment interactions erode our will to take action, replacing it with desires shaped and calibrated by models over which we have no control. By denying the free will of their occupants, smart buildings challenge the right to action that the German philosopher Hannah Arendt defines as one of the most fundamental rights of humans, the one that differentiates us from animals.

So, should we prohibit, or at least regulate, the technologies embedded in smart buildings ?

The answer to this question takes us back to the very origins of Western civilisation. Long before Big Tech, the Greek philosopher Socrates was concerned with the nature of an ideal city. In The Republic, he explains that the difference between a city where citizens have all the luxuries and a city without luxuries, which he calls “a city fit for pigs”, is the ability of the residents of the former to choose their way of life, unlike the residents of the latter where this choice is simply not possible.

Smart buildings will power the modern digital equivalent of antique cities of luxury. However, without granting their occupants the ability to make informed choices about technology, they would provide satisfaction at the expense of their rights.

To avoid building an entire environment imposing such trade-offs on all of us, smart building occupants should retain the legally defined right to decide for themselves the role of technology in their living spaces. Only then can their freedom be respected.

The writer is professor in real estate at University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada