Let’s talk about Ring, missing dogs, and the surveillance case

Jaime Siminoff: But when you put AI in it, now, all of a sudden, you have this human element that AI provides you. I think with our products being in neighborhoods, and again, you have to be a little bit specific to it, I see a path where we can actually start to eliminate crime in a neighborhood to let’s call it close to zero. And I even said, of course there are some crimes you can’t stop.

Nilay Patel: Automatically, show people what you mean. You put enough Ring products in a neighborhood and then the AI ​​does something to help you get closer to the mission of eliminating crime?

So, the mental model, or how I look at it, is that AI allows us to have… If you have a neighborhood where you have unlimited resources, every home has security guards and those security guards are people who have been working in the same home for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. Their knowledge of that house was intense. They knew everything about you, this residence, your family, how you lived, and the people who came in and out.

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

Can I ask you a question about this neighborhood specifically?

certainly.

Have you ever stopped and considered that this neighborhood might be bad? Just the idea that every house on my street would have private security guards who knew everything, and I would have an HOA, and that the HOA would have a private security force.

You could easily paint this as a dystopia. Everyone is so scared there are special cops on every corner, and I pay the HOA fee, which is just a nightmare in itself.

So, I assume you live in a safe neighborhood.

I hope so, yes.

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

But I’m just saying that the model is “everyone is too afraid to have their own cops.”

I think the model is that it’s not profitable to commit crime in a neighborhood like this, and I think you want people to move on to another job. I don’t think crime is a good thing and so I think… But listen, it’s definitely an argument to be made, and I think… I think safer neighborhoods allow kids to grow up in a better environment and I think that allows them to be able to focus on the things that matter, and that’s what we’re after.

I just wanted to challenge the hypothesis.

I think it’s a fair challenge.

The model is that there are cops everywhere. This level of privacy.

Yes, they are not policemen. I think you will have the ability to understand what is happening. It’s not like… but yeah, I think, listen, it’s a fair statement, I think. I think I want to live in a safe place.

There is a lot of intelligence in your area, and it may or may not be private security. What does artificial intelligence do? Does it make the camera smarter? It allows you to more intelligently evaluate what the cameras see?

Now, we just say motion detection, motion detection, motion detection. It’s funny, when I started Ring… the book was fun because I had to go back and go through the whole story of how this thing came to be, and motion detection was a wonderful invention. You’re at the airport, and there’s movement at your front door, and you’re looking at it like, “Wow, this is crazy.”

Now, with AI, we don’t have to tell you about motion detection; We should tell you what’s there, when you should look at it, when it matters, and we shouldn’t bother you all the time. This is what I mean by the idea of ​​security guards in your home or neighborhood. There has to be this intelligence in your area that can tell you when you should try to be a part of something, but it doesn’t 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 this now.”