I am a software engineer… a programmer… a code monkey. I love messing around with tech. I am constantly tinkering with my PC and I write custom software to help me with the more mundane tasks in my life. So you would think that my house is filled to the brim with smart devices and any and all things IoT (Internet of Things). Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

I hate smart devices…

Mostly anyways. They’re just not smart in any way. So maybe it’s actually impossible for me to hate smart devices because they don’t actually exist. “Smart” in smart devices is like “hover” in hoverboard. Hoverboards don’t actually hover and smart devices are stupid.

A lot of people (high and low profile) are afraid of an AI takeover.

Really?! Google, the creator of DeepMind, can’t even make a device that can interpret your speech correctly, or properly distinguish your voice from a radio host. How many times have you had to retype what you wanted to say because speech-to-text failed? Of course, you could just use the on screen keyboard. For example, today I gestured a word and it was wrong, so I deleted. Another attempt to gesture, only for the same wrong word to pop up again! Frustrated, I opened up the keyboard and sighed as I tapped each letter individually. Only to fat finger the wrong letter!

It’s not just smart phones. There are accounts of thermostats setting the wrong temperature, TVs unexpectedly turning on, and Roombas constantly getting stuck or worse. A lot of times it just seems more inconvenient than not.

I am sure one day smart device can do what you want most of the time. We’re just not there yet. Until then, I say we stop trying to make everything smart. Do I really need my backyard light to guess when to turn the lights on? No. A motion sensor will suffice. Or better yet, the light switch is only a few steps away. Some things are just better dumb.