I am a caveman 2.0

I have a friend who has a smart home, smart phone, smart car, smart everything.

His washing machine tells him when it’s finished. His blinds close automatically and send him notifications. He gets alerts when the temperature in his kitchen drops. There’s a voice assistant in every room, a smart TV, a smartwatch and probably a few other things I don’t even know about.

It all works together.

And honestly, I think it’s pretty cool.

I’m just not sure I want any of it.

I sometimes wonder if that makes me a bit of a caveman.

I don’t have a smart home. I don’t really want one. Not because I think all of it is useless, but because I keep asking myself one rather annoying question:

Do I actually need this?

There are things where the answer is obviously yes. A smoke detector. A home alarm. Something that can warn me when something is actually wrong, especially when I’m not there.

That makes sense to me.

But then we get to things like the washing machine telling me that it has finished.

I already know.

I’m the one who put the clothes in it (hmm, actually, mostly my wife does that).

Maybe this is where I start sounding like a complete jerk, but I like things I can understand and control myself.

A light switch turns the light on.

A thermostat changes the temperature.

A washing machine washes clothes.

And my Casio watch, guess what… tells the time without any connection to another smart thing.

That’s about as complicated as some of these things need to be.

There is also the question of what happens when the smart part stops being smart.

What happens when the server is down? Or the internet? When the manufacturer shuts down the service? When the app disappears? When your expensive four-year-old device is suddenly no longer supported?

I don’t really like the idea of my house depending on something I don’t control.

Also, most of these devices communicate with something. An app, a server, a cloud service, whatever. And that usually means data. And there’s privacy.

A smart home can tell someone quite a lot about you. When you’re home. When you leave. When you sleep. When you turn the heating down. What you watch. What devices you use. It’s no longer just between you and your thermostat.

Maybe that data is completely harmless. Maybe nobody ever looks at it.

I still don’t particularly like the idea of someone building a profile of my life from the things inside my own house.

I don’t see why my washing machine needs to know anything about me beyond the fact that I put some clothes inside it.

The less of that information leaves my house, the better, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s probably the real reason I’m so reluctant about smart home technology.

It’s not really about technology.

I like technology. I spend far too much time playing with Industry 4.0 robotics, CNC machines, 3D printers, computers, Linux and all sorts of other things.

It’s about dependence.

The more things I connect together, the more convenient everything becomes. But at the same time, there are more things between me and the thing I actually want to do.

I like having a plan B.

If the Wi-Fi disappears, I still want my lights to work.

If the internet goes down, I still want to control my heating.

If an app disappears, I don’t want my blinds to become permanently stuck.

I don’t want my house to become less useful because some server somewhere stopped answering.

I’m not saying I’ll never automate anything. There are definitely things I’d like to automate, especially things that save time or make the house safer.

I just don’t want to automate something simply because I can.

Maybe I’m just a bit old-fashioned.

Or maybe I just really like knowing that if everything suddenly stops working, I can still walk over to the switch and turn the damn light on.

I’m a caveman 2.0