Time to get Lazy?

[Metaphysical]

Automated Home Systems.
As soon as you open your front door, the heating is just right, the cleaning has been done, the oven is preheating ready for your dinner, the TV is switched on to your favourite show!
Sound good? Or too much technology in control?
What are your thoughts?

[snotmonkey]

i got one. she's called Sam

[j2buttonsw]

I wouldn't trust my PC to count to 10 (in case it didn't do it the microsoft/apple mac way) let alone interact with an oven. Can you imagine the extra error messages to decipher? A what happens WHEN the thing crashes? The fire brigade telling you to Alt-Ctrl-Del?

[Jonathan R]

Dodgy, it's one thing if the video brakes down or you lose a document half way through but with your house - no way! Someone told me that they were on a Virgin train the other day with those electric doors on the toilets when someone had forgot to lock it and someone else pushed the open button. It had to open fully, wait and then eventually closed to the relief of the poor woman on the loo! In the good old days, the door would have been shut immediately. Technology would be fine if we could trust it to work how we wanted it to all the time, I can't see that ever happening though.

[xyzzyplugh]

What about having a house key like a car key that recognises your signal and unlocks, maybe puts the porch light on too. You trust your cars with this technology..

[Metaphysical]

LOL j2buttonsw! I do agree that I wouldn't trust my laptop to work without crashing. I would only trust my laptop to work as a drinks mat or paper weight (no danger of crashing at all!!).
Like the auto lock/porch light idea xyzzplugh, although I'm not sure I trust the technology in cars either!
But I suppose you gotta start somewhere! Personally I'd start with auto lights' well ones on timers at least.

[rekstout]

All these things are in the grasp of current technologies - we embrace far more dangerous technologies every day without batting an eyelid - ever flown on a plane on autopilot or ILS, ever driven a car with an electronic throttle linkage or engine management system?

The majority of systems we could use throughout our houses are not already inp lace because of infrastructure and cost. In order to have an automated house we would have to retrofit a hell of a lot of cabling or sensors and replace every major appliance. Many new buildings have such facilities anyway such as zappers for doors (especially in apartment blocks) - I have one for my front gates and garages. Most people have automatic security lights with passive infra red sensors or timers, many of us have alarms, some connected to a monitoring station for automatic emergency services despatch.

It's all coming but it will creep in bit by bit rather than with a big bang - technology is moving faster than we can realistically implement it is all - remember - if we were all luddites we wouldnt have gas, AC electricity or telephones in the home.

[j2buttonsw]

I could very well be wrong but many example of "computers" doing complex tasks (running aeroplanes/cars) are hard-wired devices with very simple task settings unlike PC which has to deal with a much varied coding source which is often badly written. The effect is that a dedicated system will fail less than a jack-of-all-trades one. Maybe.

[lisaj]

The cost of software development goes up exponentially as the demand for reliability increases, since there is an ever increasing need for checking, double-checking and checking again. Debugging is not cheap! This is why you'll find that a piece of business software for trading costs MANY times more than your desktop spreadsheet - it's not just a question of functionality, but of reliabiltiy and when things go wrong on the LSE you're talking about $trillions of trades each day. When it comes to human life such as NASA or Boeing's flight control systems, you're looking at software that has been rigorously tested and debugged line by line over many years. If it goes wrong, people die. Full stop. Now the point of all this is that in consumer software (such as that used to make your fridge order some more milk), no-one really cares if it goes wrong and you have en extra pint arrive on the doorstep. If you put in the cost of making this software rock solid, it'll be too expensive for people to buy.