Op-Ed: Home automation: Waddling towards cohesion or herding a lot of AI cats?

If you innocently ask, “What’s the latest in home automation?”, be patient. Expect a lengthy wade through terminology and an absolute zoo of peripherals and interfaces.

Also expect a surprisingly bland and somewhat cluttered visual experience. Home automation isn’t glitzy. The almost-new “Internet of Whatevers” isn’t at all flashy. Just omnipresent and a bit pushy.

They even dare to use the word “functionality”.  Some jaded tech-watchers may wince sympathetically, but some method has finally caught up with the general madness.

The visions of the future vs the reality

Back when people were allowed to visualize outside the drab post-something-or-other and formulaic dystopias churned out by algorithmic schmaltz, the future was actually interesting. Seriously. Really. Sort of, a bit.

Automation was seen as inevitable, but friendly. Somewhere between The Jetsons, Wallace and Gromit, and Star Trek. You’d just wear unlikely fashions and wander around in an affluent haze of convenience and storylines. Thousands of years of technologies to wind up living in a sitcom.

The current reality is a mix of Big Tech, come-and-go appliances, and any amount of retrofitting to various vintages of buildings never designed for these technologies.

Objectively, the current non-standardized potpourri is delivering to a point. It does the jobs assigned to it. The overall impression of buying a Temu yard sales is purely coincidental.

On the other hand, it’s a series of choices of technologies, prices, and finding ways to meet needs. This is still gizmo-buying, slightly upgraded to LLM level as AI finds its way into the market. The cat-herding analogy isn’t a coincidence.

What’s actually happening? Template, please.

What’s happening is networking. The various functions are being streamlined into Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, and open-source Home Assistant. The LLM and AI components are inevitable, but it makes sense in terms of a more holistic local and extended system theory for individual premises, and it’s customizable.

As you’d expect, the rampage of hardware is pretty full on. Gemini cites no less than 50,000 devices. One look at the Australian SmartHome website will provide you with an instantly familiar and instantly forgettable array of icons and a map of devices on a dashboard touch screen.  It’s plug-and-play ad infinitum.

Then there are costs. The AI overview of prices for upgrades to home automation from DIY level to a new house ranges from $500 to $100,000. This is all as scalable as it seems. The question is whether you really need any of it.

Déjà vu is also hard at work in this environment. If you have never seriously considered home automation of any kind, the price structuring and the raging blizzards of related apps will tell you that your instincts already knew what to expect.

Home automation evolution

Lewis Carroll could probably do as good a job as anyone at predicting the evolution of home automation. The Mad Hatter’s LLM is easy to see in the bedraggled mythos of AI, let alone when running your air conditioning. A rabbit with an Apple Watch isn’t out of the question, either.

The first problem for home automation is likely to be a mix of redundancies, dysfunctions, and obsolescence. Unsupported apps, outdated functions and related clutter, and dust-gathering systems are equally likely. All of these things and related problems are under warranty, another tricky issue for most appliances.

Given the fact that most operating systems turn over in about 5-10 years, home automation is going to have to be ready to fix gaps in service and plug holes in networks as players drop out. Expect 10G soon enough, too. This is likely to be a much-unappreciated ongoing problem-solving exercise for homeowners.

Now let’s add all the home tech that doesn’t exist yet. Say you want to play a game on your new Chinese 3D holographic TV with a few friends. Can you do that? Can your home automation AI box simply set it up for you? It’ll have to do something.

The good news, and you may sneer as you consider it appropriate, is that Big Tech has to keep up with these things. Home automation has to chase lifestyles. Serves them right.

A sudden lack of antiquated upscale marketing might help, too. Home automation isn’t going to be confined to mansions and yachts. The other 99% are also 99% of the real market for home automation, and that simple fact seems to be being obsessively ignored.

It’s a big mistake. Experience so far with Alexa, Siri, etc. indicates that they’re not really very agile when trying to keep up. Remember that these were the big breakthroughs a decade or so ago, and they simply got absorbed into daily life with a certain amount of sincere cursing. Chatbots are much the same.

These and similar technologies waddle along trying to match functions to facts. Worse, they keep selling to a largely fictional, almost romanticized market that can afford the most expensive things.

It’s surprising to see that the conversational versions of AI are more likely to understand the needs of home automation than the poor souls creating the physical hardware and software. The LLMs may wind up babysitting the market but it may be that AI can pin down real functional needs better than ponderous sales meetings.

How to tolerate learning about home automation

The thing to know about home automation is that it takes time to get a grip on what it is, what it does, and what you can convince yourself you need. It’s best to do a bit of window shopping, and above all compare prices and the likely degree of disruption.

Start with the money, then check out the values of the systems:  

How much do you want to spend?

What are the operating costs?

What are the service and support costs?

Do you have local services available when you need them?  

What’s going to disrupt your life when getting installed?

What do you really want from home automation?

What’s genuinely useful about it, ignoring the sales pitches?

What could be a major mess if it goes offline?

How do you customize?

Sales resistance is good for you. Be a tough customer and get answers.