In contrast, smart devices have many soft failures. They work today and they don’t tomorrow. They fail for various reasons that are not under their direct control, and because of that they have a much larger mental overhead for me.

For instance, I can shut the garage door with a traditional switch and be pretty certain it will close. Yes, they do stop working, but it is a hard, catastrophic event that makes me take notice and act.

By contrast when a smart device fails, it can often fail silently and temporarily so I find myself constantly second guessing the thing I just did. “Did it work? Is the sensor showing me the correct state? Did it open on it’s own? I better go outside and check it.”

I find myself thinking about said thing way more during the day than I used to. And this is fatiguing. Yes, it has some added benefit to automate certain tasks, but any benefit is wasted by the overall mental overhead it is adding back on me. Definitely not worth it except for trivial things from my experience.

The internet of things in 99% of cases is a classic example of "Too clever by half". Build simple things that last, don't turn everything into digital junk by making it run crappy software that harvests data.

I like my electronics like my dogs: dumb as a mule.

In their perception, I should be all over every new little gadget and interconnected doodad, but those sorts of devices just drive me up the wall. There is always some annoying issue or limitation, a lot of them don't even perform their primary function adequately, and if something goes wrong, you have no logging or diagnostics possibilities, short of maybe cracking open the case and looking for a JTAG connector or something.

It drives me crazy when I can't just look at a log file or at least get a descriptive error message, it's always just "oops, something broke, sorry about that teehee". Then you power cycle the device and hope that works, if not then you try a factory reset. If that doesn't work, what do you do? Everything is so integrated today that old-school fault finding on a PCB won't yield anything of value. I hate it.

I do have some smart/IoT/modern gadget tech devices. The thermostats on our radiators are intelligent. By this I mean they have a programmed daily schedule, to lower temps at night. They also sense open windows from the temperature drop and shut the heat off and then on again when we close the windows. The only connectivity on them is Bluetooth, which has to be turned on by a button press on the individual thermostat, every time you want to connect to it. That is the sort of connectivity I will accept from "smart" devices.

The other is a Chromecast, which is reluctantly tolerated because it's the lowest-friction way to have a collaborative queue of videos to watch, when you're in couch potato mode. But if anything goes wrong, you have to break out the garlic and black candles and hope you can perform the proper incantation to make it happy again. If I could get similar functionality on the HTPC in a web browser tuned to https://youtube.com, that little puck-like bastard would be forever banned from the premises.

If I want more home automation, I will program it myself using a Pi or Arduino or ESP32 or something, combined with commodity electronics and sensors. So far, the need has not presented itself.

"Smart" devices should, wherever possible, function as dumb devices if for whatever reason they can't be smart. There are a whole lot of devices that simply become bricks.

One thing that consistently jumps out at me, though, is the lack of legitimate consumer demand. The motives for buying smart devices are shallow, for the individual. Trying out new toys with disposable income, purely out of boredom, tends to sum up why most people opt for slightly smarter dumb things.

I can think of many powerful applications for smart devices, and almost none of them are in the home. Parking garages, or almost anything transportation related, short term lockers at public places like gyms, any hospitality setting, where nothing actually belongs to an individual, but routine maintenance is required. Any vending machine is kind of already on the internet. Break rooms in office settings, and so on.

In some respects, I don't even want my desktop computer to be an autonomous internet enabled device, and it's the smartest thing I own. I don't regard it as a reliable server of information. I don't want anything personal to become a reliable server of information, because any information it might serve is almost assuredly, implicitly personal.

There is a relevant difference though. The button to adjust the mirrors in my car carry no significant disadvantages, other than a very nebulous and easily-dischargeable moral hazard. (That is, even if you are worried about the "laziness" of using a button to set your mirrors, you can easily negate this simply by using the time or effort saved on some other worthy goal; even my great-grandpa couldn't really argue with that.)

But a lot of these "smart" devices carry several non-trivial disadvantages: Almost every one of them is actively spying on you; a non-trivial number of them are smart for the sole purpose of spying on you because there is no other current economic reason for the device to be smart. They generally add a dependency to an external cloud service, which in many cases has a shorter expected life span than the device itself. I'd submit that corporations would be far less enthusiastic about "smart devices" if they were not planning on abandoning them after a couple of years, and instead had to book a 10-20 year liability on to the books to account for future support, even just security updates for any network-attached devices that don't hook to a "cloud". They add interface complexity to what is often a relatively simple device, at least prior to its smartification. Some people may love their "smart lightswitches" but there's just no way to beat the light switch in terms of complexity.

I don't think the "you're just the old fogey of the future" argument here, along with frankly being a bit audience-hostile, works. I'd submit as further evidence for this that a lot of us who are most worried about all the smart devices and most resistant are the neophiles who have been surfing the cutting edge for a long time. I've been a neophile for a long time, and I can present evidence that I'm still a neophile in other contexts, but whoa, nelly, I'm not filling my house with this stuff. Even my phone and I have an uneasy relationship at times.

(I used to be excited about the thought of having a home robot for various tasks. But now I can expect that home robot to be hooked to the cloud, and literally spying on everything its sensors can get at, which is everything in my house, and turning the full "nudging" power of every company involved into manipulating me and sucking dollars out of my wallet with every scuzzy trick anyone has ever thought up. It'll bring the non-ad-blocked browser experience into the real world. I'm much less excited now. Perhaps I'll be able to afford to pay extra for the ones that don't do that, but we're still talking a social problem here for those who can't.)

Let me end with a re-iteration of the fact that the whole industry excitement about "smart" is almost certainly entirely predicated on those industry's fully-justified belief that they can toss a product out into the world, and abandon it the instant it ceases to be useful for milking their userbase of advertising dollars, which is "immediately" for some things like light bulbs. If the industry had to account for long-term support, the industries would be singing a completely different tune... how could a smart lightbulb carrying 10- or 20-year liabilities, often with a non-trivial black swan chance (think Mirai here) of requiring very swift and very serious reworking of the firmware, possibly compete with a dumb lightbulb where the companies only carry very calculable and relatively brief warrantee obligations? There's a non-trivial way in which this excitement about smart devices is predicated on screwing customers naive enough to buy these things.

For example, automatically turning lights on and off on a schedule, changing light color to red at night, being able to casually set reminders without bothering with a phone, controlling your TV without needing your phone (e.g. for netflix), being able to change temperature on a schedule, all kinds of things.

Just because they occasionally have bugs for some people doesn't mean they are entirely useless. Many people (myself included) have few to no problems with their smart home devices.

On the otherhand, devices and products that are not advertises as "smart" are often better and actually use very sophisticated algorithm.

On the plus side, smart home automation is great for those with mobility issues or disabilities, the elderly. It also could save a lot of energy globally.

On the other hand, a lot of things just don't need to be smart, and making them smart often means that they are not directly servicable by owners. When something breaks, you need a whole stack of knowledge about software to figure out where it went wrong. A lot of us here might have that knowledge, but even then it's a giant hassle. It seems insane that in the future it might require arcane knowledge of Python, bash, and Linux to get your lights on. That's some kind of fail.

The most cynical view, which I sometimes dare myself to consider, is that all of this smart home/internet of things is just another bubble where hardware manufacturers are pushing their chips into literally everything because they have to keep making more money...somehow.

In the latter case, well. Civilization doesn't need more hucksters, even if they are selling little black squares of silicon this time around.

Anything that actually needs controls is having those removed from the consumer facing parts: What can you make your "smart TV" do vs what the manufacturer can modify? how about your "smart" phone? Anyone think the "internet enabled appliances" aren't going the same way?