JAIME SIMINOFF: But when you put AI into it, now all of a sudden you have this human element that AI gives you. I think with our products in the neighborhood and again, you have to be a little bit specific, I see a path where we can really start to reduce crime in the neighborhood and call it close to zero. And I even said that there are some crimes that of course you can’t stop.
NILAY PATEL: Mechanically walk people through what you mean. Have you placed enough Ring products in your neighborhood and then had the AI do what it did to help you get closer to zero crime?
So the mental model, or the way I look at it, is that AI allows us to have… If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, then every house had a security guard, and those security guards were people who had worked in the same house for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that in terms of knowledge. So the knowledge they had of that house was extreme; they knew everything about you, about the mansion and your family, about how you lived, about the people who came and went.
And then if the neighborhood had an HOA, call it a private security service, and that private security service was also around and knew everything that would happen? When a dog gets lost, you would 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 do we change it and bring it to the digital world –
Can I ask you specifically about this neighborhood?
Clearly.
Do you ever stop and think that the neighborhood might be shit? Just the idea that every house on my street would have an all-knowing private security guard and I would have an HOA and the HOA would have a private security force.
You can easily paint it as a dystopia. Everyone is so scared we have private cops on every corner and I pay HOA fees which is just a nightmare in itself.
So I assume you live in a safe neighborhood.
I hope so.
No, today I’d 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 in their house and can’t go out and…
But I’m just saying that this model is “everyone is so scared they have private cops”.
I think the model is that it’s not profitable to do crime in a neighborhood like that, and I think you want people to move to another job. I don’t think crime is a good thing, and so I think… But listen, it’s certainly an argument, I believe 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 that’s what we’re all about.
I just wanted to challenge an assumption.
I think it’s a fair challenge.
The model is that there are cops everywhere. That level of privacy.
Yeah, they’re not cops. I think it’s more about having the ability to understand what’s going on. It’s not like… But yeah, I mean, listen, I think that’s a fair statement. I think I want to live in a safe place.
There’s a lot of intelligence around you, and maybe it’s private security, maybe not. What does AI do? Does it just make the camera smarter? It allows you to more intelligently evaluate what the cameras see?
Right now we’re just saying motion detection, motion detection, motion detection. It’s funny when I started Ringo… The book was fun because I had to go back and actually go through this whole story of how this thing came to be, and motion detection was an amazing invention. You’re at the airport and there’s some movement at your front door and you’re looking at it like, “Wow, that’s crazy.”
Now, with AI, we shouldn’t have to tell you about motion detection; we should be telling you what’s there, when you should look at it, when it matters, and not bothering you all the time. That’s what I mean by this idea of these watchmen in your house or in your neighborhood. There should be this intelligence around you 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 like, “Car, car, dog, person, person.” It’s like, “Hey, look at this. You want to pay attention to this right now.”