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Comment by justahuman74 | Hacker News Reader

"Smart" has come to mean something sinister

“ Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

It's interesting; AFAICT "smart" in relation to consumer electronics has seemingly never been used for any other meaning than "is connected to the Internet, enabling some cloud service to manage it, and for you to interact with it through that cloud service."

Meanwhile, if you want to express the idea "a device that uses local sensors + local processing to attempt to optimize for property a human configured it to optimize for", you don't call the device smart — you call it intelligent.

Sure it has. Here's one brand that's used "smart" for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_%26_Paykel

That brand is seemingly trying to use "Smart[X]" or "[X]Smart" as trademarked jargon terms referring to specific features its products have.

This is different in kind from generic common-language use of the word "smart" by consumers as an adjective attached to product categories ("smart fridge", "smart home", etc.), which is what I was referring to.

Even in the 80s, the X10 "smart home" automation technology was all about networking the devices in your home together to put them under control of a central hub; not about any active "intelligence" per se.

A thermostat has always been an example of "device intelligence", but has never been called "smart" technology... until recently, as there are now "smart" thermostats (like Nest.) But these are another Internet-of-Shit product, and that — not any clever behavior — is what makes it a "smart" device.

Reminds me of "Smart" motorways in the UK - they're "Smart" in that you can drive on the hard shoulder when there are no accidents. When there are accidents, the hard shoulder is meant to close and the motorway returns to normal operation with a hard shoulder. What actually happens is you break down, there's no hard shoulder and a lorry slams into the back of you killing your entire family. The Highways agency has been referred to the crown prosecution service to consider charges of corporate manslaughter.

All these companies figured out that idiots will pay a subscription fee for things that they used to pay for just once

Yup - as soon as a third party realized they could start making money off of it.

Now that is Smart!

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