What’s lost in the Internet of Things, according to Koolhaas?  “Adventure. Risk. Transgression.”

Koolhaas says he came to the Valley to try to understand the digital revolution and the Internet of Things, which “will transform our relationship to cars, buildings, cities.” The Harvard professor says he wants to understand whether the changes to come — smarter cities, intelligent refrigerators, driverless cars — are “desirable or scary.” What does his intuition tell him? “I don’t know,” Koolhaas says. He is being diplomatic, I suspect. 

One of the few tech gurus who engages with Koolhaas, at least now, is Tony Fadell, the CEO and founder of Nest Labs. It started with intelligent thermostats but aims toward something Fadell calls the conscious home. (Yes, it’s the company Google bought for upward of $3 billion.) “We had a nice polemic this morning,” Koolhaas says, his bright blue eyes dancing. When the two men meet, they spar, as they did at the Venice Biennale for Architecture this summer. Fadell extols the thermostat’s intelligence — it makes life more efficient and comfortable — while Koolhaas worries about it. Not only for the privacy reasons, which Fadell insists are moot, but also because of what’s lost in the quest for improvement. 

“Adventure. Risk. Transgression,” Koolhaas tells me. Technology’s promise to make life easier and more secure comes at the price of our freedom, he says. When a thermostat tells us we’re using more energy than our neighbors, or a car tells us we’re going too fast, we tend to comply. And Koolhaas worries that such directives are essentially authorless. No one will claim responsibility for them. 

Koolhaas came of age in a different world...