If technology is to save us from climate change, it has some tough challenges to master: taming wave, wind and sun, cheaply scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air or mastering fusion.
But a growing number of people think another should be added to the list: mastering human nature. This "persuasive technology" would sway people to adopt less polluting behaviour and may come in the form of new gadgets and online services or new features for existing technology.
Energy savings from behavioural change can be dismissed as advanced marketing techniques and may seem trivial compared with the esoteric materials science that is needed to harvest solar energy more efficiently. But there is much to be gained.
Last week New Scientist reported that US emissions could be cut by more than 7 per cent if people changed their ways at home. Separate studies in US, Dutch and British homes have reported that 26 to 36 per cent of domestic energy use is "behavioural" – determined by the way we use machines, not the efficiency of the hardware itself.
This means that "machines designed to change humans", as the persuasive technology group of Stanford University, California, calls them, could save us huge amounts of energy and money.
Energy awareness
Many projects are trying to make that happen, with two main motivations. One is to understand which facets of human nature can be manipulated to change behaviour. The other is to develop technical strategies to do so.
A simple technique underlying many projects is to provide read-outs of people's energy use, in situations like the home where it has historically been hidden. It is well known that giving drivers feedback on fuel efficiency, for example, leads them to use less fuel. The information-rich dashboard of Toyota's hybrid Prius and Ford's new fuel-efficiency "vine", which grows leaves when you save fuel, are good examples of this approach. Studies of home power meters suggest they encourage homeowners to cut energy use by 10 per cent on average.
Persuasive tech that can track the effect of everything you do is the next logical step. For instance, a number of teams are working on cellphone apps that use GPS to guess what you're doing, and what that means for your carbon footprint.
Robot adviser
More advanced ideas go beyond providing numerical digests. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are using iCat, a robotic cat made by Philips, to advise on energy use. It talks and can move its lips, eyelashes and eyebrows.
One experiment showed that when programming a washing machine, people were more inclined to follow energy consumption advice about different cycles when it came from iCat rather than graphs and numbers. That suggests the savings which simple awareness can provoke can be magnified by using more "social" mechanisms to deliver advice.
That doesn't have to mean robots – it could be on-screen characters, for instance. But the friendly car dashboard robot
under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows how such "persuasive agents" could develop.
Over-advised
Relying heavily on persuasive technology to turn around our wasteful habits would raise ethical questions, though. Do we really want to be surrounded by technology designed to undermine our free will and personal responsibility?
The Dutch group using the iCat have shown that flashing subliminal messages can guide people to correctly rank the energy use of appliances: a kind of persuasion most people would probably agree is a step too far. Other persuasive gadgets and services that can tweak our behaviour for the "better" may be less easy to decide on.
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Have your say
the i cat sounds an awful lot like the universaly hated microsoft paperclip.
I suppose the old expedient of chargine more for/taxing what you don't want people to use is passé? After that, you give them the tools to figure out how to use less.
I completely agree, this whole soft-talk of putting the power to do good in consuming trends blah blah is completely useless from my perspective, if something is bad and urgent without a doubt from a scientific perspective, something that needs to be curbed for CO2 reduction, then what are we waiting for to make it utterly unaffordable??? Tax it to hell and back I say
Going on my last power bill a 10% reduction in domestic power consumption would have saved us about 10 cents/person day. The cost of power would have to increase enormously before cost saving alone would have been a motivator.
On the other hand, my desire to be a good environmental citizen is a much stronger motivator. The bill indicates that a 10% reduction would have reduced greenhouse gas production by 0.26 tonnes/yr. Doesn't sound much but if this was the average per capita saving in Australia we would have produced about 5 million tonnes less per yr. Not enough to save the planet on its own but a useful contribution.
Similar comments can be made about cars. The savings from a 10% reduction in fuel consumption would average about 50 cents/car day - hardly a strong cost motivator unless you are very poor.
Despite these low potential savings it is interesting to think about the political damage that would occur if the government announced 10% increases in the price of fuel and electricity for "the sake of the environment" let alone price increases large enough to actually drive significant change.
for a whole range of reasons increasing price to drive change should be seen as the last resort, not the only option considered.
If these are taken to the obvious extreme, as noted through various science fiction authors, they would be sold, svailable as energy secretaries, butlers?.. That is employment places that only the very rich can afford when human based, but when stuck in a $10 become avaiable, or at least useable by far more people?
Given that these devices will by definition, sales requirements etc, be fully networked with every other world wide, you would be looking at energy secretaries, butlers, that just like human ones, chat and pass information between themselves about what has occured, is occuring, giveing companies ideas about using brownouts instead of distributed power, or even hackers having easy access to all sorts of base living data, such as how much power a given family uses on which device to watch which channel and purchase such a product?
Especially as the new RFID chips will be integrated with the energy scanners to track them?.. You could easily end up with the tags in your cupboards adding up to a distributed processer thats more powerful than your currently used desktop.
You would have thought the robot dog wouldve been useful, it having security designs as well?
Still, intresting ideas and implementation.
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