Garden of Eden

A life in an ecosystem without ownership

”Good morning, Eve. Are you ready for a wonderful day? You have now perfectly rested.” Sapa, Eve’s voice assistant, softly wakes her up while increasing the intensity of the bedroom light. After sleeping for exactly 07:54 hours, Eve is well recovered from the past day and is feeling energized.

As Eve takes a shower, Sapa prepares the morning coffee. Sapa is made by Serpent, one of the few major brands in the home industry. A few years ago, Serpent made a large number of acquisitions, so Eve got most of her devices from them, which makes them interact perfectly with each other. Her coffee machine is a special model capable of producing the drink to a personalized intensity, which is quite expensive. Eve still wanted to try it and thus opted for a Pay-per-use model. The machine itself was free, but Eve had to agree to buy beans for at least 30 coffees per month. It is an older model called Gaggia Classic, which has been recycled and updated with modern features. That is quite common due to the European Union’s (EU) circular economy policies. The beans are her favorites, sourced from a local vertical farm.

After her shower, Eve puts on her Serpent Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and makes her way to the kitchen to enjoy the drink. “Could you please fetch the new bag of coffee beans I ordered, which were just delivered?”, Sapa asks. The devices in the home are truly smart nowadays, yet some things still have to be done by humans. Eve quickly opens the window of her city apartment and empties the drone delivery box that is attached to the window board. “At least I do not have to go downstairs to get my packages as my parents used to,” she thinks.

After spending some leisure time reading, Eve wants to burn off calories doing a workout. For this purpose, she recently subscribed to a workout package, including a smart mirror. Eve prefers using the mirror instead of wearing her glasses during a workout. In this mirror, she can see both, herself and the animated instructor. Eve is not particularly athletic and did an exhausting run yesterday, so the instructor proceeds more slowly today. To have this degree of personalization, she agreed that her fitness tracker could use the data for this purpose. This is common these days as the government strictly regulates data sharing. But Eve usually accepts everything because the services make everyday life so much more convenient. She saves a ton of time.

Exhausted, Eve looks forward to her lunch. “Sapa, show me the available dishes for today,” she instructs Sapa and views the dishes on her Serpent AR glasses. She is subscribed to a convenient lunch service by the company “Foody” that has an exclusive partnership with Serpent. Every day, Eve has five alternative dishes to choose from. These dishes are chosen such that they use ingredients that grocery stores would otherwise throw away. Ten minutes after choosing her lunch, a drone arrives and delivers the ingredients. While she could also order pre-cooked meals, she still enjoys spicing the dishes with herbs from the community garden and working with the fresh and healthy ingredients once a day. She quickly cooks them in the Serpent oven that Sapa already preheated and finally enjoys the meal.

A notification pops up in Eve’s field of view: “Daily Standup with Team at 01:00 PM.” Eve quickly goes over to her

ultrasonic dishwasher, a cube-shaped cutout in her kitchen countertop, and puts her dishes into it. “I can’t imagine how people had these huge dishwashers back in the days, having to place all of their dishes neatly into it. And what a waste of space!”, she thinks to herself. Her ultrasonic dishwasher works without water and barely uses any electricity. A timer and a small icon hover over the closed dishwasher, now flush with the rest of her countertop, indicating the time left for the dishes to finish. She knows, she’s still within her calorie limit for the day, and the numbers in her Serpent health profile have been great this past couple of months. Eve grabs a piece of chocolate from her “treats drawer”, willfully ignoring the calories that her glasses show for it as she snacks on it.

She makes her way to her working room, a small, mostly empty room with a desk, and a chair facing the window. Her employer had provided for both, the desk and the chair, which is made of 100% recycled materials. There is barely anything except for a couple of pictures and notes scribbled with ineligible work-related things on her desk. Eve sits down on her chair and puts on the VR headset and accompanying bracelets, all provided by her employer. The bracelets are capable of measuring her finger movements down to every detail. They provide air resistance to simulate haptic feedback for the actions she takes in VR. This meant, she didn’t have to own a physical keyboard, instead only a virtual one. Eve used to work at a place using equipment from “Genesis”, Serpent’s main competitor. Still, while she liked the job, it was too much of a hassle to have the work devices incompatible with her private Serpent ones. Sometimes, she is missing the good old days, where people would still gather in the office and have a laugh over a cup of coffee.

As she puts on her headset, she immediately finds herself on a wide, open field. She sits on a tree stump in a round grove surrounded by gigantic, lush trees. Around her are her team members, Cain, Able, and Lilith. “Hey Eve! How are you doing? Have you tried the new forest environment in Serpent Work?”, Lilith asks her, sitting on the stump opposite of hers. Serpent Work is a service provided to companies that models digital offices: every employee can choose their environment. While Eve sees the forest, Cain is sitting in a spaceship control room, surrounded by his coworkers. “I’ve got it activated today!”, she responds. Eve had asked Sapa to download it this morning. After her standup, Eve wraps up some of the tasks she wanted to get done for today.

By 05:00 PM, she is done with all her tasks. As she puts her AR glasses back on, she checks her notification board by making a throwing gesture to the wall. There are a bunch of messages. Adam, her boyfriend, is coming over soon, and she still needs to get her laundry done. Eve loads her laundry into the box, Serpent provided for it and hands it over to the house robot. Which will bring it back in 30 minutes, all clean and dried. But the robot refuses to take the box as it is too heavy by 100g. After taking one shirt out of the box, the robot carries the laundry to the shared laundry room with her neighbors, where the content of the boxes are cleaned and dried, using Serpent’s newest washing and drying technologies.

A sharp, ringing sound comes up. It seems like Adam arrived, as Eve can see on her glasses. Her doorbell has recognized Adam on the door. “Sapa, let him in,” she says, signaling her home to open the door so that Adam can enter. “Hey Eve! You mind if I order food already? I am starving!”, he yells as he enters her living room. “Sure, go ahead. I am just finishing up the laundry.” “Sapa, can you get me a Pad Thai and Eve a Lemongrass Curry?” “Sure, Adam. I ordered it. Estimated delivery is in 10 minutes.” Sapa knows their dietary profiles and the food they like to order, so all of that context is enough for her to order the right dishes from their favorite restaurant. If they wanted it differently, they would specify so. “You do not happen to have a Genesis charger, right?”, Adam asks. “No, I just have the ones provided with my place.” “Did you book the trip to the Alps already, Adam?”, Eve asks him. “Yeah. I guess we can work from there now that it is getting warmer. Our satellite subscription covers 7G in the whole EU anyways, so it should not be a problem.”

As the night approaches, the lights in Eve’s home by themselves dial down their blue light all the way to zero. Just from the home temperature drop, she knows it’s time to sleep. “Eve, would you like to start your meditation?”,

Sapa asks with her soothing voice. “Sure, let us get started.” Eve sits down, and Sapa guides her through today’s evening meditation. Eve had a pretty relaxing day, so the meditation adapts to that circumstance, guiding her to reflect on the day and face the future with a calm mind. With all of these recommendations and intelligent devices, she sometimes questions if she’s really the one making the choices. Ready for sleep, Eve goes to bed to recover from her day with a whole night’s sleep.

Signposts

■ Tesla diversifies production portfolio - from cars to coffee machines ■ EU releases new data protection law: business-to-business data sharing and re-use now more restricted ■ Amazon closes Alexa interfaces for third parties ■ AR glasses now released for the public mass market replacing conventional smartphones and computers ■ Google starts first managed settlement, Apple follows with first Apple village ■ New EU circular economy law forces adaptions of business models, product design and supply chains ■ New International Telecommunication Union report: 5G access available to 95% of earth’s population ■ Preferred business model of tech players shifting from ownership to Pay-per-use and subscription models ■ Study reveals that 50% of people in the EU work remotely at home or in coworking spaces ■ The biggest five tech players have now a market share of 90% of the Smart Living Industry