How many people live in fortresses of solitude where they need to automatically track the cars that come down the driveway?
How many Silicon Valley billionaires need a computer to tell them what to wear today? (t-shirt and jeans again?)
Why is it useful to have automated control of the lights in every room? Turning lights on and off, using a plain old mechanical switch, is about the easiest, most mindless task I perform on any given day.
To better understand, the movie Her is good for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) - everything is seemless and automatic, like having an omniscient butler
As others have mentioned, China and Singapore are also other motivations ie. 'automated jails', especially since western governments are moving closer to their philsophy of control while they simultaneously criticize it.
That he shouldn't be inventing all this stuff? Why not?
As the article says, he's ahead of the curve. The next generation will consider all this stuff normal, and just the way the world works.
But if we didn't have people making stuff just because they wanted it, nothing would ever happen.
The bigger market for vehicle monitoring is probably second homes though.
Who needs a website showing pictures of goldfish when you can interact on a bulletin board?
Hard to predict which technologies get adopted.
This was correct. People aren't carrying their high-cost phones everywhere because they want to make telephone calls. They're just called "phones" by coincidence.
There were carphones which required a big box in the trunk. There were cellphones that did nothing but make calls. It wasn't until much later that mobile phones started doing anything but making phone calls.
So no, "this was" not "correct".
Anyone who sits in a place waiting. Put a phone a smartphone in their hands where they can look up the thing they're thinking about (or anything else on the net that they can access). Instant comprehension.
> Who needs a website showing pictures of goldfish when you can interact on a bulletin board?
Ask anyone to imagine what the bulletin board looks like in a geographical location far away. Then enter a URL for that far away location and receive the response in seconds (vs days of travel). Instant comprehension.
> Hard to predict which technologies get adopted.
That's true. For the two examples I gave above, there are many more where respondents instantly recognized the benefit but the technology still didn't take off.
However, that's beside the point. The point is-- what is the moment of "instant comprehension" for all of someone's appliances phoning home to a third party?
Edit: just to add another example. Someone does an hour commute to and from work. Put them in a self-driving vehicle. Now they potentially have two extra hours of concentration they can devote to something other than the road. Even if they're fearful of using it in the automated drive demo-- instant comprehension.
Also, the third example does not yet exist as a common vehicle so I cannot have hindsight bias. But again, glaringly obvious that reading a book instead of staring at the road for an hour would be an enormous gain in productivity and agency for lots of people.
Or even take a failed futurism-- If I had a jet pack I could quickly fly on a whim to the beach and have a picnic. Instant comprehension.
What's the cool thing I get to do that I currently cannot if my household appliances all send streams of sensor data to a third party?
> Who is all this engineering effort for Everybody.
Sure right now philips hue cost hundreds of dollars, but that price is going to drop seriously. The price of smart-everything is going to drop.
Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.
remarkable! how did people ever live without this before?
but i'd still be stuck having to chew my own food? oh wait, soylent!
I could see some use in smart-home devices to do things that "always" need done, and that don't need a connection outside of the home. Like "if anyone's home, keep it between 65 and 80 degrees, depending on humidity and delta with the outdoor temperature".
But I've never seen an example of something that I'd call anything more than a minor convenience, at best. Will I use it when it's ubiquitous in society? Meh, probably. But I don't feel the same excitement about it that others seem to.
In a sense, they didn't! When you're outside, the sun and sky already provide "a million different shades and intensities" of ambient light, depending on the time of day and the weather. Those fancy colored light systems could be seen as replicating that variety indoors.
Yea so you install one of these http://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Dimmers-Switches-Outle...
>Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.
Now try to imagine all the gaping security holes emanating from your house. And oh man it's gonna suck when the remote server goes down and your thermostat can't phone home so you're stuck at 55F during the winter
There are always tons of ways to make stupid decisions, a small amount of research usually helps.
If people are too hesitant to give up their homes' security and privacy to corporations, some company will eventually come up with an open-source self-hosted solution that doesn't suffer from those issues.
In such a case neither the devices nor the main controller need to phone home.
Which one of those lets you customize the color and hue?
We installed a motion activated light in our laundry room, years ago, since the switch was not in any convenient/sensible location. It worked for awhile, but eventually would turn on, if at all, for like 3 seconds (even when the switch inside was set to 10 minutes).
Probably it was just a cheap, crappy fixture. But I don't think I'll ever try to use a "simple" motion activated light again.
Of course, connected lights, whatever that means, are probably even buggier...
So being able to turn the light on when you walked in was no guarantee you'd be able to do the same when you walked out again.
Agreed, but ...
The switch and light are where the original house owner wanted them. If I want to move either of them, I'm calling an electrician and tearing through walls. And, if you want to add a second switch that controls one light, good luck.
Being able to wire the light and the switch separately is useful.
And you never yell at anyone you know about doing the same?
People yelling at family members over leaving the lights are essentially "penny pinching" fractional cents of energy costs. I'm sure all the computers, sensors, networking gear, etc, that make this all work consume significantly more power than if you were just to leave every light in your house on 100% of the time, especially if we're talking about LED bulbs.
If your house is so small you only need one bulb per room and has a couple of rooms (i.e., you live in an apartment), where the light is fove feet from you, nobody is going to market a product for that.
As the other responder said, you're still in for at a minimum 20 watts in a room for an actual house. Further, you pay for those watts again if there is AC (so more like 25-30 watts), the lights might not all be tied to the light switch, and they may not all be rooms you frequent. And then add on that rooms you don't frequent may still have incandescent bulbs in them because you stopped, like me, after replacing 20 or 30 bulbs and you're replacing the rest as they burn out.
You don't have to optimise your usage much to totally offset the power cost of using smart devices
That switch stays on fro, sun up to bedtime.