How to Tell a Really Smart Home From a Not-So-Smart Home That Only Thinks It’s Smart

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I happen to believe that real innovation, smartness, and greatness lie, at all levels, from homes to countries, in solving real problems with as little resources as possible.

For homes, I strongly believe that the really “smart” homes are the dumber less digitized ones that contain the smallest possible amount of DC current and obviously, open hardware and software. I also think that such homes would be a big deal for more reasons than most people believe. Especially political reasons.

Unfortunately, we’re a long way from there, and I can’t apply the “smart” label to homes that contain:

• TVs so rude with their eavesdropping that even their makers warn customers not to discuss personal information in front of them (while continuing to make spy TVs so annoyingly 2010s and so oversized as to be unfit for otherwise adequate living rooms).
• Toothbrushes that cost $230 because they can play music… until they can’t.
• Air fryers that want to know your gender or talk to China.
• Smart locks that make apartments inaccessible.
• Gas boilers so smart that they won’t restart after a power failure.
• Light bulbs and switches that won’t light your room unless they’re wired to another room with a server that’s located thousands of miles away.

Where “Dumb” Is Defined as “Smart”

Stuff like that would be bad even if it didn’t cause people to unknowingly profile themselves or overspend. It’s the hardware equivalent of AI girlfriends, or other made to order ways to make living alone feel cooler, or maybe less depressing. It’s even worse when dropped on children by parents as $1,700 “smart” bassinets, voice assistants that foster machinelike speech, or data harvesting smart toys that groom babies, literally from cradle to grave, to be passive data sources.

By creating more e-waste ending up where it shouldn’t, falsely smart homes also contribute to illegal immigration: you can’t block migrants if you turn their homelands into e-waste dumps that keep growing. Also, it’s unlikely that we will ever build enough grid — even if there were enough technicians, which there aren’t — to make every household smart in that way with renewables. Sure, “cheap solar panels are changing the world,” but “a 100% solar grid would be insanely expensive, even though generating solar power is basically free.”

There are exceptions, of course. For people with disabilities, certain devices can be actual life-changers, but in all other cases, calling homes loaded with unnecessary, environmentally damaging, and privacy intruding technology “smart,” looks to me to be a major reason why aliens would never try to contact us.

Anatomy of a Really Smart Home

Really smart homes are something other than what’s being sold as “smart”. They’re about politics and more freedom for everybody. Most human beings live in urban areas, more often than not in apartment buildings, and barring major catastrophes that’s not going to change. Today, these people heavily depend on central administrations or corporations that are less than accountable for necessities such as food, waste removal, and energy. The moment those billions of people — and not just country cottage owners — don’t completely depend on central utilities and their regulators for their energy, politics will change big time.

Before this energy liberation of the masses can take place, however, I think there are at least two things that must happen. One is the convergence of increasing solar panel performance with decreasing energy requirements from home appliances, along with growing common sense from building owners to give most condo apartments what only McMansions have today: space — hanging off windows and exterior walls — for enough solar panels to give residents most, if not all, the electricity they need. The other thing is DC-powered appliances, to end the waste of powering products that already use direct current internally with alternate current generated from the direct current provided by solar panels.

I don’t think this will be enough, however. We’ll need much more tech than this — including nuclear power, done the open source way — because I’m not talking about getting “poorer” here. I’m talking of going “back to the future” of Western material standards of living as they existed in the 1980s — which wasn’t a time of all gloom and deprivation — made much more efficient by modern technology.

To get there, DC-powered homes will have to become a mandatory and important piece of the puzzle. Such a world would also be much safer than today, without the energy and raw minerals bulimia that makes certain nation-states plot and fight to control the Ukraines (rare earths), Gazas (gas), Greenlands (oil, minerals), Afghanistans (many more minerals) or Venezuelas (crude oil) of the world.

How do we get there? With lots of changes and effort, starting with “upgrades to simplicity‘ that include:

• Avoiding like the plague almost every smart home/connected home product there is.
• Demanding and supporting in all possible ways open hardware standards, mandatory interoperability of parts, more right to repair laws
  and more “right to keep buying.”
• Substantial incentives for adoption of really smart solar-powered dryers (a.k.a. “clotheslines” or “clothes drying racks”) and production of DC-powered open hardware appliances that last decades, like the Increvable washing machines.

What else? You tell me! There’s a comments section below.

Marco Fioretti

Marco Fioretti is an aspiring polymath and idealist without illusions based in Rome, Italy. Marco met Linux, Free as in Freedom Software, and the Web pre-1.0 back in the ’90s while working as an ASIC/FPGA designer in Italy, Sweden, and Silicon Valley. This led to tech writing, including but not limited to hundreds of Free/Open Source tutorials. Over time, this odd combination of experiences has made Marco think way too much about the intersection of tech, ethics, and common sense, turning him into an independent scholar of “Human/digital studies” who yearns for a world with less, but much better, much more open and much more sensible tech than we have today.

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