What are your thoughts and feelings on smart devices in home (echo, home, etc)?

[vivster]

haxxiy said:

vivster said:

You sound like someone in 1900 defending candles against lightbulbs.

You live yourself in a highly automated world and wouldn't want to have it any other way. You really need some self reflection if you truly cannot get that concept. I'll make it easier for you. Just imagine that everything that is wireless today would suddenly become wired again. You'd see that as a hassle too.

It's kinda silly to complain about technological advances and how lazy has everyone become when you yourself live in a world that people just a hundred years ago would call easy life magic. Why do you get delivered food when you could go to the store and buy and prepare it yourself? Why would you go to the store and buy food when you could grow it yourself? You must be an extremely lazy fuck.

You are attacking the strawman here. The improvements on quality of life brought about by new technologies back then was significantly more tangible.

It's fairly easy to illustrate just how much. Imagine you are presented with the option of choosing either: a) you are allowed to use any eletronic technology made until 2007, and you keep running water and indoor toilets; or b) keep your smartphone and iPad, but give up running water and indoor toilets, so you have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. So, that's one decade of new products brought about by a competitive economy of 7 billion people versus one single innovation of the late 19th century.

You could make an even more extreme argument here and pit a single innovation of the 19th or early 20th century (electricity, running water, heating etc.) versus giving up any new transportation invented since 1957. Cars and jet planes were just as fast back then - faster, in the case of jet planes - as they are now, and metro and trains existed as well, so, again, it should be simple to pick an option.

So while I do agree that voice recognition, touch panels and connectivity, as you mention it, will on all likehood be a part of houses in the future, it's a much lesser improvement than what we were used to on the past two centuries, and based on such standards, people are thus somewhat justified on calling out that the next big thing isn't that big at all.

You're completely right but you're wrong about what people are saying. They're not saying that it's not a big change, they're completely rejecting the idea as useless or even go as far as attacking people who would like this minor improvement in convenience. Of course some technologies will not have a huge impact but that's not the fact to focus on. It doesn't matter how small the advancement as long as it's overall beneficial.

What I'm seeing is people outright rejecting change in a fit of superiority over "newer generations". People have become the grand parents they said they never would become. "In my time we stood up when we wanted to turn a light on. The lazy kids these days just shout into the room." Sound familiar?

There is no problem in saying that you don't need something in your life but I'm vehemently defending against notions that it's either generally not useful or that people who embrace new technology are somehow stupid. It's grandpa bullshit. Those "concerns" about privacy at this point are just empty fuel against new technology because people don't even know what they're trying to "protect" themselves from.