The ultimate appeal of a smart home is the anticipation that one day we will have systems in our homes that have the intelligence to understand and predict our behavior, and adjust the environment to the users preferences, which it learns autonomously. This level of automation is currently impossible to do mechanically, making software the only viable option. Moreover, the days have long gone where a user has to fiddle with dozens of buttons to operate a system—in its place, we now have touch screens and tablets with adaptive and programmable user interfaces.
The ultimate appeal of a smart home is the anticipation that one day we will have systems in our homes that have the intelligence to understand and predict our behavior, and adjust the environment to the users preferences, which it learns autonomously. This level of automation is currently impossible to do mechanically, making software the only viable option. Moreover, the days have long gone where a user has to fiddle with dozens of buttons to operate a system—in its place, we now have touch screens and tablets with adaptive and programmable user interfaces.
In 1982, Alan Kay, a computer pioneer, said in a talk: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” ...