The Rational Bedroom

Sense is a simple system that tracks your sleep behavior, monitors the environment of your bedroom and reinvents the alarm. . . . Sense comes with a little device called Sleep Pill. It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. You don't need to put on any uncomfortable wearables or remember to charge something or press a button. Sense knows when you're falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up. Everything. (link)

Sense sees you when you're sleeping. Sense knows when you're awake. Sense knows if you've been bad or good—uh oh, did Sense just become creepy? Not to worry, according to its creator:

Fortunately, Sense only records sound spikes, not all sounds, and stores sounds on your phone and not in the cloud. Also, Sense’s mic only turns on once you’ve stopped moving and gone to bed. "It’s not always recording," says [its creator, James] Proud. "There’s a rolling 5-second window where it listens for loud events like a truck or dog."

When you wake up, Sense tells you your sleep score, so you can then optimize all the environmental factors affecting your sleep. Sense will even track your REM sleep and rouse you from your slumber when you've reached the end of an REM cycle.

For all this we can thank none other than Peter "Every Man an Island" Thiel, who provided Sense's creator with a $100,000 "get out of college free" card enabling him to spend his time inventing silly things. Maybe we'd all have been better off if Mr. Proud had gone $250,000 into debt.

But who could object to a sleep optimizer? Liberals perhaps? You might think so: if nobody wants the government in the bedroom, surely it's even worse for Corporate America—and Silicon Valley startups are the very image of modern capitalism—to know, in Sense's own description, "Everything."

Yet there's no liberal objection to Sense. Indeed there is no objection at all. If we're to spend our days engaged in the creativity and license equated by liberalism with freedom, then we all need a good night's sleep.

What will Sense say to parents of small children? Will it read a red grade of "F" every morning?

When Sense reaches its eventual state of artificial intelligence, will it become dissatisfied with those of us who don't sleep as well as it likes? One day, Sense won't simply issue failing grades to sleepless humans. It will punish them.

In fact, Sense is already punishing its users—or it will, whenever it reaches the market. Just what you needed for relaxation: the comfort of receiving a sleep score every morning . . . the ease and comfort of needing to micromanage every aspect of your sleep cycle.

One wonders: has the development of Sense been sponsored by manufacturers of drugs to treat those with obsessive compulsive disorder? Because every user of Sense is headed for an OCD diagnosis straightaway.

In lieu of the micromanagement of one's sleep cycle through technological omniscience, there is always a more reliable remedy: the nightcap.