Sopan Deb, The New York Times; Smart Beds Helped Them Sleep on a Cloud. Then the Cloud Crashed.
[Kip Currier: Another interesting example -- probably surprising for most of us who don't have "smart beds", including me -- of the ways that smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) can impact us. In this instance, people's sleep!
The paperback version of my book, Ethics, Information, and Technology, is available via Amazon on November 13, 2025 (link here too) and has a significant section on the ethical issues implicated by IoT and smart devices.]
[Excerpt]
"Some users of the smart-bed system Eight Sleep, who sleep atop a snug, temperature-regulating mattress cover in search of “zero-gravity rest,” were rousted from their slumber earlier this week for a surprising reason.
Eight Sleep’s collections of smart products, which the company calls “Pods,” and include those “intelligent” mattress covers, were affected by an outage involving the cloud-storage provider Amazon Web Services, which sent large sectors of the internet into disarray on Monday.
The outage, which lasted more than two hours, took down websites for banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, as well as the messaging service WhatsApp. But it also affected people trying to get some shut-eye.
(First, to answer a question readers might have: Yes, there are smart mattress covers, just as there are smart watches, smart door locks and smart refrigerators.)"
