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

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 neighborhoods and, again, you have to be a little bit specific to it, I do see a path where we can actually start to take down crime in a neighborhood to call it close to zero. And I even said, there are some crimes that you can’t stop, of course.

NILAY PATEL: Mechanically, walk people through what you mean. You put enough Ring products in a neighborhood, and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of zeroing out crime?

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

And then, if that neighborhood had an HOA with, call it private security, and those private security were also around and knew everything, what would happen? When a dog gets lost, you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh, 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 that and bring that into the digital world is—

Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically?

Sure.

Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck? Just the idea that every house on my street would have all-knowing private security guards, and I would have an HOA, and that HOA would have a private security force.

You can easily paint that as dystopia. Everyone’s so afraid that we have private cops on every corner, and I’m paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare of its own.

So, I would assume you live in a safe neighborhood.

I hope so, yeah.

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

But I’m just saying that that model is “everybody is so afraid that they have private cops.”

I think the model is that doing crime in a neighborhood like that is not profitable, and I think that you want people to move into another job. I don’t think that crime is a good thing and so I think … But listen, it certainly is an argument to have, I do believe that … I think safer neighborhoods allow for 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 so that’s what we’re going for.

I just wanted to challenge the premise.

I think it’s a fair challenge.

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

Yeah, it’s not cops. I think it’s more that you’ll have the ability to understand what’s happening. It’s not like … But yeah, I think, listen, it’s a fair statement, I guess. I think I want to live in a safe place.

There’s a lot of intelligence in your neighborhood, and maybe it’s private security, maybe it’s not. What does the AI do? Does it just make the camera smarter? It lets you do a more intelligent assessment of what the cameras are seeing?

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 actually go through this whole story of how this thing came to be, and motion detection was an amazing invention. You’re in the airport, and there’s a motion at your front door, and you look at it like, “Wow, this is crazy.”

Now, with AI, we shouldn’t be telling you about motion detection; we should be telling you what’s there, when you should look at it, when it matters, and we shouldn’t be bothering you all the time. That’s what I mean by this idea of these security guards at your house or in your neighborhood. There should be this intelligence in your neighborhood that can tell you when you should be trying to be part of something, but not 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.”