Technology

Smart Meters and Artificial Intelligence, Monitoring and Taking Care of Your Consumption

Introduction:

Smart meters made some headway in the media in the late 2000s, but they’ve died down a bit now. Monitoring is important, in our busy lifestyles we easily lose track of our resource consumption and many other ‘distractions’ from new emerging social, economic and environmental challenges. People try to create personal/professional hierarchies of these challenges as new priorities succeed old ones which then gradually build up…many things start to seep in the background until they are at an uncontrollable stage.

Too often this causes collapse, as we have seen with phenomena like recessions that have continued to emerge over the last century and a half.

What is yours called?

Many predicted that homes would be run by computers in this age; for the sake of this article, we’ll call the AI/home computer ‘Central’; turn off unwanted heat sources or lights that are not needed. With refrigerators sorting your food, containers measuring how much recycling you have accumulated or making recommendations for the reduction/non-use or minimization of waste. Maybe the garage decides how much juice to charge your hybrid/electric car with.

Central‘ would take a lot of responsibility. Save money, time and resources. However, some people may worry about being overindulged or becoming too reliant on technology. However, what if many of our distractions in life could be handled by Central? People could then fully concentrate on their domestic, family, community, leisure and work lives.

Invariably, with the constant leaps in internet innovation, faster connections with 4G in the 2010s, 5G in the 2020s – we will become much more of an interconnected nation, if not an international community. This may sound idealistic, but every Garden of Eden has its Asp. In Smart Meters, this snake is the mass of privacy issues where people can feel like their home AI is watching them and reporting their activities.

Privacy issues:

Will your privacy be compromised? Is your home AI spying on you? What about civil liberties? What privacy would be compromised on the home front? Nobody likes their dirty laundry airing out in public…so how do we balance our future lifestyles with the potential economics of smart meter monitoring? Some districts and counties internationally have halted the installation of smart meters for privacy and health reasons. Are EMFs a problem?

Privacy concerns will require that specific household information be considered anonymous (names, dates of birth, income, etc.), but a great opportunity arises to collect real-time data on exactly what is going on in every home, office, factory, and processing plant across the country. /planet.

No need to name and shame: just support the ‘drainers’…

Who is not saving energy? Who is wasting energy? Who is participating? Who is acting parasitic in the office or in the community? Who is voting? Who is participating? Unlike naming and shaming communities where energy/water conservation doesn’t exist, utilities can use the data to start remediation efforts.

This will help shape policy to improve water leakage, energy savings, flood impacts, health issues – the list is endless and smart meters/AI for the home can make a significant positive contribution. Politicians can see the low voting areas in many large and small scale elections and make efforts to embrace these communities.

This is not about impeding a person’s privacy because they have been naughty in wasting resources, but rewards should be given to groups in workplaces or communities that are actively making positive changes that embrace sustainability in their locality. As people’s details i.e. name cannot be obtained through future enforced privacy acts and practices, only whole districts will show up in the statistics engines that have measured all these positive changes.

Practical aspects of smart meters:

do we really need[water/energy/heat/electricity/waste/health/livelihood/flooding] supervision? Most likely we really will. There have been some monitoring technologies/practices in use for decades. For example, the reliable fire alarm, CCTV or neighborhood watch. These have helped improve our lives. Many people complained about security cameras in the UK, but with the London riots of August 2011, security cameras were embraced as a saving grace in handling the identification, tracking and arrest of criminals. involved.

Using the theoretical causation analogy of a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan caused a hurricane in Tornado Valley. Everything is causal and has a domino effect. A fire in your neighborhood will have circumstances for everyone, a kidnapping will damage the trust of the community, etc.

The flooding experienced by many countries can be addressed with effective water management, rainwater harvesting and other measures to balance floods and droughts. One thing is certain, however: if homes, offices, and factories in higher latitudes do not absorb some of the water that falls on mountains and valleys, lower ridges will suffer greater potential flood risks. This provides further support for extending AI/smart meter monitoring high up in our valleys and mountain communities. What can invariably be monitored and addressed at higher land altitudes can reduce negative impacts on lower altitude communities.

If the richer countries do not absorb their runaway carbon emissions, the poorer countries will be unfairly punished by the onslaught of the many Global Warming backlashes of freak weather conditions etc. Furthermore, as developing countries do not have the financial and technological resources that developed countries do, poorer countries will not be able to cope with these disasters as well as richer countries can/or recover as quickly afterwards.

Biodiversity:

Academics within the scientific community have increasingly pushed for monitoring (and support) of biodiversity to ameliorate many ecological problems. Invasive species are frequently mentioned in the media, academic studies, or field research papers. Too often, however, the busy everyday person will quickly forget about these problems until it’s too late.

You won’t be bothered by some invasive white ghost slugs that consume our much-needed earthworms (which oxygenate our soils and therefore maintain soil fertility and integrity to keep our agricultural industry alive!)

Home smart meters/AI could be designed to monitor the soil as well as our built home environments. This may seem pointless, but if innovations come soon, we could implement them and be able to get sophisticated monitoring of groundwater contamination, soil structures, pollution increases, invasive species of animals and plants.

Things are getting so bad in many countries that mortgages are being turned down in many cases where the infamous Japanese Knotweed invasive plant has taken root in someone’s garden and will inevitably work below the foundation and compromise the integrity of the home. This severely compromises the ability of many citizens to move/relocate. All this can be fixed if we had real-time AI/Smart Meter monitoring. More evidence will gain more public attention and increase our knowledge of many issues we are otherwise unaware of.

So what direction now?

Home smart meters/AI will inevitably be with us ten years from now and commonplace in 2020. We could sleep much better knowing that ‘Central’ it is taking care of us, our use of water/heat/electricity, gardens and soils and much more. If it is going to go ahead, privacy concerns are paramount and high priority with AI/Smart Meters (realistic) that cannot be hacked and cannot be compromised.

What can you do? Will your company pioneer the best innovative AI/smart meter technologies? Will you become a market leader and save the earth in the process?

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