Let’s talk about Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state

JAÏME SIMINOFF: But when you put AI in there, all of a sudden you have this human element that AI gives you. I think with our products in neighborhoods and, again, you have to be a little specific, I see a path where we can actually start to reduce crime in a neighborhood to get it closer to zero. And I even said: there are some crimes that we can’t stop, of course.

NILAY PATEL: Mechanically, explain to people what you mean. You install enough Ring products in a neighborhood, and then the AI ​​does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of eliminating crime?

So the mental model, or how I see it, is that AI allows us to have… If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, every house had security guards and those security guards were people who worked in the same house for 10 or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. Thus, the knowledge they had of this house was extreme; they knew everything about you, this residence and your family, how you lived, the people who came in and out.

And then, if that neighborhood had an HOA with, let’s call it private security, and those private security were also there and knew everything, what would happen? When a dog gets lost, you think, “Oh my God, my dog ​​is lost.” Well, they called each other and one of them found the dog very quickly. So how can we change this and bring this into the digital world?

Can I just ask you a question about this particular neighborhood?

Of course.

Have you ever stopped and thought that this neighborhood might suck? Just the idea that every house on my street would have omniscient private security guards, and that I would have an HOA, and that HOA would have a private security force.

You can easily describe this as a dystopia. Everyone is so scared there are private cops on every corner, and I’m paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare in itself.

So I assume you live in a safe neighborhood.

I hope so, yeah.

No, today I’ll go to… If you want, I’ll take you to a place where people live and have to, when they come home from school, lock their doors and stay at home, and they can’t go out and…

But I’m just saying that this model is “everyone is so scared that there are private cops.”

I think the pattern is that it’s not profitable to commit crimes in a neighborhood like that, and I think people need to change jobs. I don’t think crime is a good thing and so I think… But look, it’s certainly an argument to be made, I think that… I think safer neighborhoods allow kids to grow up in a better environment and I think it allows them to focus on the things that matter and so that’s what we’re looking for.

I just wanted to challenge the premise.

I think it’s a legitimate challenge.

The pattern is that there are cops everywhere. This level of confidentiality.

Yeah, they’re not cops. I think it’s more that you will have the ability to understand what is happening. It’s not like… But yeah, I think, look, that’s a fair statement, I guess. I think I want to live somewhere safe.

There’s a lot of intelligence in your neighborhood, and maybe it’s private security, maybe not. What does AI do? Does this just make the camera smarter? It allows you to make a smarter assessment of what the cameras see?

Right now we just say motion detection, motion detection, motion detection. It’s funny, when I started Ring… The book was fun because I got to go back and go through all this history of how this thing came to be, and motion detection was an incredible invention. You’re at the airport, and there’s movement outside your front door, and you look at it and go, “Wow, that’s crazy.” »

Now, with AI, we shouldn’t talk to you about motion detection; we should tell you what’s there, when you should look at it, when it’s important, and we shouldn’t bother you all the time. That’s what I mean by this idea of ​​these security guards in your home or in your neighborhood. There should be that intelligence in your neighborhood that can tell you when you should try to be a part of something, but not always tell you. So it’s not just “Car, car, dog, person, person.” It’s like, “Hey, look at this. You want to pay attention to it now.”