Smart Houses Are Kinda Tacky

The “touchscreens everywhere’ idea of the future kind of horrifies me because imagine what companies will do with that. Your smart house blares ads at you as you enter. You can’t use your toaster because you forgot to pay a subscription. Pop-ups on your windows and mirrors. A power outage happens and you’re locked out of your house. Hell world

If Danny's phone is unlocked using his face, can't his millions and millions of dopplegangers unlock it too? Hm, I think we're onto something, greg.

imagine the power goes out. the whole house is suddenly very inconvenient

imagine one day we have fully smart houses that lock you in/out if the internet dies

There was a short story written by Ray Bradbury in the 1950s that was about a house with AI that kept cleaning and making meals and going about the daily routine despite the fact that a nuclear war happened and all the people living in the house had been killed. That story always reminds me of smart houses.

Man I hate digitalising things that don’t need it. My city’s public transport recently forced students to use a mobile app instead of a travel card, and now my phone’s shitty battery dictates whether I have to walk home. Of course the card does also require an electronic reader, but at least I won’t get fined if it doesn’t work 😄

As for the chip house, my brother uses magnetic locks on all the drawers in the kitchen to keep his toddler out of them, and I can’t open them. I feel like an idiot every time I’m swiping this magnet around to find the dang thing. I can’t imagine having to do that for every single drawer/door/cabinet in the house.

I have a severe joint disorder and I've been wanting one of those robots because sometimes my elbow dislocates under just the weight of a shopping bag. It kills me that I have a need for one and know exactly how it will fit into my life's needs, but she goes and just buys one because it's cute.

I've actually had a smart house for years. It's great, at first the doors unlocked and locked whenever I waved my hand near them, instead of me just opening them. The house can control the doors too! It's great! The doors now lock whenever the house wants. I've been stuck here, in the bathroom for 10 years. But it's great. I love my smart house. I'd recommend getting one. It's great.

Part of why this annoys me is that it’s just so wasteful. They aren’t automating things to make it more accessible to disabled people, they’re doing it to cater to wealthy people who want to look cool. It’s a completely unnecessary waste of our planet’s finite resources. Rare earth metals are called that for a reason, and the process of mining them is often done with unethical labor methods and is extremely damaging to the ecosystem. And in addition to that, it requires electricity to run them! Reminds me of that idiotic “smart composter” that was billed as being eco-friendly, but actually has a net negative impact on the environment because of the amount of electricity it required. And all because wealthy people don’t want to just keep a compost bin in the cupboard under the sink or in their backyard?

I'm down for smart mirrors if I can use the command "mirror mirror on the wall, make me not look like a fool" to buy clothing

In the Korean smarthome, I suspect the “snow” can just as easily be yellow dust. Rain and snow are avoided more than in the US because of the yellow dust pollution in them, plus the straight-up dust itself. The dust comes from China’s deserts but also contains industrial pollution. It comes in very, very small particles (which is why KN95 masks are so great and plentiful - they are technically dust masks) and viruses and bacteria can be carried with the dust clouds. So regardless of what Americans would do in the same situation, some Koreans want to sanitize clothes when they get home. Sanitizing your shoes is also important because you wear socks or slippers in other people’s homes so having sneakers or work shoes with odors is more embarrassing that it might be for some Americans. Different cultures but these aren’t creating problems, they are solving problems that already existed in another place. Now vacuum cleaners on the other hand … we used to be perfectly happy just dragging the carpets out twice a year and beating them to get the dirt out and now our floors are expected to be perfection?!? Stoopid vacuum cleaners creating new problems.

i stayed in an airbnb with a bunch of friends and it happened to have a “smart” stove (no knobs, no buttons, just a screen)— it was literally impossible to use, we read the manual and everything lol, we couldn’t understand if it was on or off. we used our portable burner for camping to cook for everyone 😭 like when did people decide that buttons were unnecessary, im actually so bored of tapping on screens lol

Something that's bothered me for a while now -- visions of the future almost always focus on a domestic setting. This technology never leaves the house, or your own body. There's never a vision of what the technology could do on a public, civic scale -- improving the lives of an entire community rather than just a single family household.

new variety of cyber crime: Smart Crime where your furniture steals itself, All your doors lock behind you, your TV is stuck on 10 hours of screaming looped, and your smart fridge Orders you 3000 tubes of toothpaste, ah yes, the future

7:50 it sounds like that teacher who’s looking for a specific answer. “That’s a good answer, but what else could it be?”

Ive read WAAY too many dystopian books to EVER get a technology chip implanted ANYWHERE

As a cybersecurity specialist, I am very happy that all of these people are filling their homes with insecure smart devices. Keeps business booming lol

I like the smart home from 13 minutes 'cause like a lot of it is just asian home tech. like the spraying of the coat, she was running a UVB light over it to kill bacteria they seemed to crop up online more after covid started, and the shoe heater is a shoe dryer to prevent bacteria (and shoe smell) from developing. The speaker she puts in with produce is an ultrasonic produce cleaner, supposedly kills bacteria and knocks dirt and stuff off produce. also japan and possibly other asian countries rarely have washers in apartments so the pop up washer is useful. basically most of the tech used is to sanitize the home

I personally prefer a house that can do everything it normally even when the power cuts out. Which it does a lot now that it's the winter. I have an outdoor toilet and a wood heated sauna (you can also heat water with it to wash yourself), I have a wood heated stove and two big fireplaces. No matter what happens (my country doesn't get hurricanes or things like that, I live in the north) I'm prepared lol