I'M NOT SURE ABOUT THIS YET

Iattended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2011. It’s the world’s largest trade show, with hundreds of new products introduced each year. What saw were booths stuffed with future landfill: docks, dashboard mounts, adaptors, robotic vacuum cleaners, 3D TVS. One afternoon, I attended a panel discussion about the rapidly approaching “connected home”, referred to nowadays as the Internet of Things. The panellists promised that household devices of all kinds would soon be connected to one another and to the Internet, thereby transforming the average home into a futuristic fortress of hyperefficiency.

Many of the predictions sounded familiar, so while the panellists were talking I did a Google search on my phone and found this New York Times article: “Forget about waiting in your bathrobe for the tub to fill or padding around at night to lock the doors and turn off the lights. Think instead about calling up your appliances – the refrigerator, the hot tub, the alarms – from the car phone as you commute home from work. The refrigerator defrosts a pie and tells the oven to start the roast; the oven signals the microwave oven to heat the soufflé, and 39-degree water fills the bathtub.” That article is from 1988. Except for a few anachronisms (car phone, microwave soufflé), it could have been the script for the discussion I was listening to 23 years later.

Most people’s houses still don’t have almost any of that stuff, and the fact that they don’t suggests either that manufacturing truly smart gadgets is harder than anyone lets on, or that consumers aren’t all that interested in leaving raw meat in a cold oven all day so that they can begin cooking it as they drive home from work. Or maybe it’s a little of both.

In 1950, the English mathematician Alan Turing described what came to be known as the Turing Test of artificial intelligence. This states, roughly, that a machine can be considered intelligent if a human conversing with it can’t tell it’s not a human. In a similar vein, I hereby propose the Owen Test of appliance connectivity: until I can operate my Samsung TV, Blu-ray player, Amazon Fire TV Stick, and Cisco cable box with a single remote control, the Internet of Things is a hoax.

Even if the Age of the Truly Universal Remote does arrive someday, I’ll still be a sceptic. I’m confident that Apple, Google and Microsoft will be around next year to deal with freshly discovered bugs in their products, but what about Chinese companies that sell treadmill desks?

The appliances in my mother’s kitchen weren’t smart, but they lasted forever. If one of them broke, a repairman came to our house and fixed it. The last time a repairman came to my house, he told me that he’d had to get a full-time weekday job at the local home centre because nowadays, when appliances break, most people just buy new ones. And they do break. Now, the most vulnerable parts of modern appliances are usually the ones containing computer chips. My wife and I learnt that when we fried the brains of a pair of expensive side-by-side convection ovens by self-cleaning them simultaneously. The repairman’s advice, after pronouncing the circuit boards too costly to replace: buy the dumbest appliances you can find.

For the past week, I’ve been testing a cheap device that allows me to control my coffeemaker using a smartphone app. Setting it up was a pain. One instruction said that if it tells you it’s not working, just try it anyway, because maybe it is working. Although I guess I can think of situations in which the device or something like it might be sort of somewhat useful, for the most part it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

I already owned an overpriced gadget, my Fitbit, that encourages me to get off my butt by vibrating whenever I’ve been sitting for too long. And I now also own an overpriced gadget that encourages me to stay on my butt by allowing me to turn on my coffeemaker without getting out of bed. They can’t both be right.

The repairman’s advice: buy the dumbest appliances you can find.