An Unwilling Participant in Your Smart Fantasy

Please don’t make me interact with your smart home. I beg this of you.

I can understand why you built it. I can even understand the reasoning that went into it. I disagree vehemently, but it’s your house and you can run it as you see fit. I won’t comment on how you have indiscriminately peppered your private space with microphones and cameras that surely can’t be spying on you even though there’s no way to independently review the source code to know for sure. And even if there were, how many people out there have enough expertise and free time to do this for every one of these products? I won’t point out how your desk contains an always-on screen that perpetually nags you to engage with it and all the additional services that its manufacturer offers.

I won’t bring up how flagship services like Alexa have lost favor within Amazon’s ranks or how the product has become noticeably stupider due to the lack of investment. I won’t ask if you lose control of everything if the internet connection goes down. I won’t even deliver my prepared sermon about how arbitrary choices by the manufacturer could result in them no longer supporting the cloud services or mobile app development that the device relies on, reducing it to a useless pile of e-waste. Or even more likely: Arbitrarily pushing an app update that removes useful functionality or locks it behind some paid subscription.

Nope, instead I’ll just quietly mutter these things to myself.

Who genuinely wanted this?

I’d like to briefly remind everybody of a product that Amazon once sold: The Dash Button. A product that flamed out so spectacularly that every relevant page on Amazon.com now fails to load in a different way. The idea was that you would hang one of these buttons (e.g.) next to your toilet paper dispenser. On the website, you would register the button with your Prime account and your preferred choice of product. Whenever the dispenser started looking a little low, you could press the button and it would automatically perform a “Buy It Now” on that product and get it to you in however long it took the sweaty guy in the Amazon van to get it to your doorstep.

Now, you might be asking yourself, hey, how much is the toilet paper today? Is it still the same seller that I got it from last time? Is it in stock? When is the estimated delivery date? How do I know the other people I live with won’t independently notice the level is low and needlessly press the button again? Is there some kind of confirmation before this thing spends my real money and places a real order for a real product to be sent to my real house? If you asked yourself any of these questions, congratulations, you most likely have more common sense than every product designer and executive involved in bringing that idea to fruition. As a matter of fact, the technology seemed so stupid on its face that people genuinely believed it was an April Fool’s joke due to its unfortunately-timed release announcement. But no, it was real. Amazon thought people wanted to interact with its e-commerce platform in this way.

Amazon stopped selling the Dash Buttons in 2019, but the Amazon Dash Replenishment service still is still being offered. And the reason for that is to allow Alexa to perform essentially the same function via voice commands instead of a physical button press. Now, you might be asking yourself, hey, don’t some of the questions asked earlier apply more or less equally to an Alexa voice order? Congratulations, you might just have more common sense than some of the VPs at Amazon.

Alexa’s journey into the world was rocky from the start, but one nagging question has always been why Jeff Bezos was so damn adamant about building it in the first place. Amazon was already in the middle of failing to succeed at making a smartphone at that time, what compelled them to do something as difficult as building a fully voice-controlled computer too?

If I were to take a guess, I’d say it was to provide a conduit into all of the company’s other offerings. Retail, books, music, everything that Amazon sold to people. Setting timers and building to-do lists verbally is a neat thing to do for a product demo, but who could give up the opportunity to be one voice command away from making a sale from any room of the customer’s house? I doubt anyone would say it in so many words, but Alexa probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t originally envisioned as a low-friction means to sell people stuff.

It didn’t work out that way, of course. And that’s why the whole product ecosystem is languishing. But hey, better to have tried and failed, right?

Strange Bedfellows

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a niche but growing group of hobbyists began playing with devices using the X10 standard. Broadly, these devices communicated by injecting radio signals into the power lines inside a single residence. With addressable switches that could be turned on and off via signals, and centralized control devices set up to control them all, the field of home automation (or domotics if you want to sound like you’re not some kind of college dropout) was born. It was basically inevitable that home computers would become involved in the mix, and the internet soon after.

This was the earliest recognizable shape of what would we now call a smart home. Using off-the-shelf X10 devices and a tinkering spirit, these projects grew from simple lighting and appliance controls to more advanced use cases like thermostats and garage doors. However it was still the domain of the hobbyist—if there was something you wanted to control, you would have to do some degree of engineering or programming work to get it accomplished.

Somehow And I am at a complete loss to explain how. the idea caught on more broadly. Folks who weren’t hackers or tinkerers or makers or weirdos saw this stuff and said “I want that.” And the tech industry obliged. By that time, most households had an always-on internet connection with a wireless network covering the premises. Rather than piggybacking on the power lines, devices could incorporate small Wi-Fi radios and communicate over the IP network. And since there’s a whole internet right there on the other side of the router, it would be foolish not to come up with some kind of whiz-bang reason to use it!

And so, in our quest to control the on/off state of a light bulb using a smartphone, we have involved an internet service potentially thousands of miles away. Well done everybody, we have reinvented The Clapper but at Web Scale.

Smart light bulbs, smart switches, smart locks, smart garage door openers. Cloud cameras, cloud alarm systems, cloud smoke detectors. You name it, somebody out there can sell you something that will allow you to slap some aspect of it onto the internet.

John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before—

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

And now at long last, we can finally achieve what our ancestors could only have dreamed of: To be able to mumble “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” into a smartwatch and—after a mere eight second Not an exaggeration. A neighbor had this setup; that’s how long it took. delay—have a garage door open in response. It’s… neat, I guess? But it’s also kind of a testament to the arrogance of man. Is that something you intend to keep doing day after day? Isn’t it going to eventually start to get old? Wouldn’t you much rather have, you know, a button? No, not that button; that button silently orders more laundry detergent for same-day delivery. The one next to it, I mean.

I will concede that there are some benefits to having a not-completely-dumb device. Some smart bulbs, for example, can be programmed with a “wake up” automation that simulates the morning sunrise by changing the brightness and color temperature of the light over a length of time. This can be an effective and even pleasant counterpart to an alarm clock. But it’s important to note that you don’t automatically need the internet or a cloud service to make something like that work. It’s completely possible to connect to the bulb using Bluetooth, directly controlled by a nearby phone or other device. Through this local link, you can tell the bulb what time it is now, what time it should do its thing, and what that thing is. The bulb can then go and run in isolation, dutifully doing what you told it to do, until you go back in and change it. You don’t need the cloud, you don’t need to keep perpetually updating the app. You also can’t turn the lamp switch off, otherwise it forgets everything you just set up. But hey!

Peace of mind / A piece of my mind

The most common reason people seem to like having this stuff on the internet is so that they can interact with it while they are somewhere else, potentially very far away. Yes, it’s certainly possible to receive an alert from a smart moisture detector, surmise that something is leaking somewhere, then call your good friend or neighbor to swing by and shut the outdoor water supply valve off. Most of the time, though, that’s not the problem that actually occurs.

More likely, a remote thermostat app will show that the temperature in the house seems wrong. Is it following its schedule? Is the thermostat reading the temperature wrong? Is the system currently trying to run? The microphones on the indoor cameras aren’t sensitive enough to hear the blower fan. Maybe it’s just because the outside temperature is extreme this afternoon? Maybe something is broken; this will probably cost a small fortune to diagnose and fix. Or was that upstairs window left open?

This remote system has alerted you to an anomaly that may or may not actually be there—the app doesn’t really let you dig in and see lower-level data with timestamps and stuff—and gives you no way to effectively diagnose it. You can fling commands at it, but there’s no way to tell if anything has any effect because it wasn’t working right when you started. It’s not a critical problem in that you don’t need to call the police or fire department for immediate intervention, but something’s not right and it’s going to bug you deeply. Maybe you’re on a trip, ostensibly to unwind and relax. But you’re not doing either of those things now, instead you’re fighting with the terrible Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby trying to make sense of a problem that you’re far away from. This should be the kind of thing that ruins your mood after you come home to discover it. Instead it’s ruining your mood (and the whole trip) right now.

Substitute any other device you might care to. Maybe your camera system shows that there’s a light turned on when you know there shouldn’t be. Maybe your security system reported some kind of fault with one of the sensors that you’ve never experienced before. Maybe you remotely opened your garage door or unlocked your front door to let that friend or neighbor in to mop up the three inches of standing water, and now every request to close/relock the door is met with an unhelpful “request failed” error. Did the door lock or didn’t it? You’ve got a regular Schrödinger’s house on your hands, and it is not a nice feeling when you’re far away. Speaking of far away, can we talk about how insane it is that we can start an internal combustion engine from halfway around the world, without requiring a conscious thinking human nearby to make sure that there are no dangerous conditions present? You’re supposed to make sure the vehicle is not being played with by children, adequately ventilated, not backed into a snowbank, not parked over dry flammable brush… This is gonna kill somebody one day.

You can’t even trust guests to use the correct towels.

It’s always weird to have house guests. It’s weird to be a house guest. Everything in the space is strange and foreign. The faucets don’t produce the expected water temperature or pressure. The bed sheets are all tucked inside each other and folded under the mattress. Somebody advised which towel was which but all memory of what they said has vanished. You’re really saying that, on top of all that, you want your guest to also have to learn the sacred incantations that must be spoken aloud in order to turn the lights on and off?

The bedroom, like many suburban U.S. bedrooms built from roughly the 1960s to the 1990s, has a wall switch that controls an outlet, into which is plugged a lamp with its own switch, The lamp, of course, is designed to work with a three-way light bulb. And since almost nobody wants to pay the price premium to find a proper three-way bulb, it’s necessary to click the switch twice to turn the light off and two more times to turn it back on. having the accursed smart bulb screwed into it. Two perfectly good switches in the power path, but don’t use them because it’s a smart home and it needs a whole ritual to work correctly if it ever loses power. Don’t use the switches, that’s the only piece of information from the whirlwind tour that was retained. All hell breaks loose if anybody uses the switches.

Here is the thing: By moving the point of control closer to the bulb itself, you have effectively eliminated the utility of the wall switch, and the physical switch on the lamp, and the good old tactile satisfaction of just unplugging the bloody thing. Not just that, but now these switches must all remain in their “on” position at all times to permit the bulb to make its own switching choices. And on top of that, you’ve created a kind of hazard in that—accidentally or intentionally—turning the switch off and then back on potentially creates a situation where the system requires manual intervention to go back to functioning the way it was before. It creates this cognitive overhead for the guest because these switches, these things that they have been intuitively using to control their environment for most of their lives, is suddenly verboten. One of the only reliable comforts that generally works the same anywhere in the world, but it doesn’t work that way here. It is an exhausting thing to have to remember.

The last thing a guest wants to have to do is sheepishly inform their host that they absentmindedly flipped the switch.

Oh, and also? If your smart home requires me to install an app on my phone, I’m going to sleep outside in the damn car.

What is your malfunction, anyway?

You mean aside from, you know, <gestures broadly toward preceding paragraphs>?

This stuff—you know, computers and all—has been a major part of my life since I was a little kid. It has been my hobby, my profession, and something that has occupied a substantial portion of my mind and its way of thinking. I have been deeply passionate about computers at times, and there have been occasions when I wanted to throw every last one of them into a lake. I have seen not just how the sausage is made, but how it is packaged, shipped to the store, advertised, monetized, and exactly what happens when it goes rancid. I can say with a degree of confidence only achievable through years of profound cynicism that most of these products are not designed or built especially well. Yet that doesn’t stop them from becoming popular with the general public.

The bitter fact is that a lot of stuff in this industry is built by people who barely know what they are doing, following requirements and specifications set by other people who barely know what they are doing, pushed over the finish line by a handful of experienced people who actually kind of do know what they’re doing but who stopped caring a long time ago. The end result is a bunch of junky and buggy nonsense that sorta works and is definitely leaking your personal information to unscrupulous third parties.

All of that, just to control that light over there while you’re over here? That’s it, huh? A novel little party trick that was interesting the first few times you did it but rapidly lost its spark. Something that might maybe impress the friends that hardly come over since they had their baby… or that neighbor who keeps buying expensive crap to give off the appearance that he has some semblance of culture or taste. These are the reasons?

I don’t mind getting up and walking somewhere to control my environment. I’m not that lazy. My legs work. Yes, I realize that this is a privileged and ableist view, but take a look at most of the smart home installations around you. Chances are pretty good they’re not doing it to cope with a disability. More than likely it’s something they just “wanted” for some reason. And hey, I’m not here to disparage the act of wanting stuff, but have a real reason. “It was there” and “I wanted to try it out” and “Bob down the street got one” aren’t reasons. Why did you actually do it? And do you still feel it was something you wanted to do?

Perhaps one day my circumstances will change. Maybe I’ll lose mobility, or have a complicated caregiving situation, and I’ll discover that these products actually do help. That could be a reason. That would be something to cause me to reconsider my position. But as of right now, I prefer my environmental controls to be as dumb as possible, and for my data and computations to be completely local. The only computers I really trust are those I can walk over to and put a bullet in when they misbehave. Of course I am joking, but only slightly.

I’d also like to point out that I really, really do not want to have to verbally interact with an appliance or have one verbally interact with me. I do not want to have to talk to the lights. I do not want my refrigerator to talk to me. I’m not that lonely yet.

I would have to think that somebody out there has researched the preferences of introverts versus extroverts to see if there’s any kind of statistical evidence that only one group prefers audible interaction. Speaking only as myself, I don’t like making noise of any kind in general. I’m not a stomper, or a hummer, or the kind of person who bumps into things or drops them. I have been accused of “sneaking up on people” without even trying to do so. The absolute last thing I want to have to do is make an unnecessary noise to accomplish a task that a tiny switch click could have done equally well.

I suppose you could argue that I’m weird as hell. But you know what? Lots of other people are too.

Uninvited!

Things like this usually have some kind of conclusion where everything gets wrapped up in a nice little package. A couple of bullet points you can post onto social media for that sweet, sweet engagement. Or at least a summary of, you know, why you should care.

Maybe you don’t need to care. Realistically, I don’t think this article is going to change anybody’s mind. People like what they like, and other people don’t like what they don’t like. I strongly doubt there’s a single person out there who was so indecisive as to whether or not to build a smart home, that Scott’s rambling diatribe finally pushed them to decide against it. But if that happened, you’re welcome! I sincerely believe you avoided making a small mess in your life here.

I guess what I’m getting at is, if you know people like me are coming to your space, make sure the space operates like a regular dumb home. If you really must insist on smartness, do it in a way that includes direct physical controls as a fallback. Not even as a fallback… as an alternative. If you do it right, you can smart everything up however you want while permitting uninterested parties to continue to live by the “flip up for on, down for off” paradigm that I’ve been following since I was two years old and screwing around with the light switches and dimmers in my parents’ house. Being forced to engage with your smart home fantasy is just infuriating to me. Hopefully you can sort of understand where I’m coming from.

And if not? Well, maybe at least it explains why I look like I got dressed in a pitch black room lit only by a phone flashlight.