Home automation is a childish misuse of technology（626 words）

By Jonathan Margolis

-----------------------------------------------------

Mark Zuckerberg published a video on Facebook a few months ago, showing off the artificially intelligent gadgetry he has installed in his family home in Palo Alto.

The highlight comes when Mr Zuckerberg asks his smart home, whose robot assistant talks to him in the disembodied voice of Morgan Freeman, for a fresh T-shirt. This is duly fired from an air cannon in the wardrobe.

It is tempting to think this may be healthy self-parody. But I have been talking to a VP of Crestron, one of the big names in the growing home automation market, which worked on Mr Zuckerberg’s system. It seems it is mostly for real — although he conceded the T-shirt cannon may be a joke.

“Mark was talking with us for more than a year about the installation,” says John Clancy, Crestron’s head of residential installations at the company’s headquarters in Rockleigh, New Jersey.

“Now he can see which lights are on in the house and to what level, or what the temperature is and adjust each to the level he wants by executing a command using the API [application programming interface].”

Mr Zuckerberg has posted on Facebook extensive notes on his domestic electronics, and invited suggestions for other automated home gizmos he might install. Seventeen-thousand have been posted to date, suggesting that crowdsourcing creative thinking works.

“Home technology” was once the province of extreme gadget lovers, such as Sir Stirling Moss, the British former racing driver, who in the 1960s turned his Mayfair home into a whirring cornucopia of motors, control panels and sensors that would lower his dining table into place while running his bath to the correct depth and temperature.

In the 1990s, stories about Bill Gates’s tech-filled home described visitors being tagged so their preferred music and lighting could accompany them everywhere.

But today it is everywhere. According to Cedia, the umbrella organisation for these matters, custom installation — or home integration as this technology is also sometimes known — is a $14bn industry.

Last year I made a video for the FT about a man cave in Manchester with a rotating, spotlit platform for the owner’s McLaren sports car.

I love technology, and my home is full of it. But without wanting to seem priggish, I am beginning to find obsessive home automation of the T-shirt cannon/rotating McLaren type yawn-inducing.

It strikes me as a childish misuse of technology — unless, of course, you are disabled, in which case, all power to it.

Home automation is stress-inducing. At almost every installation I look at, there is to be found a frowning male stabbing at an iPad muttering about why the system is not working — and a female partner rolling her eyes.

Switching lights and heating on manually, opening your own curtains and turning on the TV yourself is really very easy and never goes wrong.

And the home automation must-have of your music following you from room to room via hidden ceiling speakers is, for me, simply horrible. Music should be listened to, not used as audible wallpaper.

What is surprising is that Crestron’s Mr Clancy agrees with me up to a point.

“I experiment with all this stuff. I had a Nest system in one zone of my home and I wasn’t happy with it, until I actually turned off the artificial intelligence aspect of it because it was making changes I didn’t want.”

Mr Clancy’s system decided he would like the heating to come on every morning in summer, the same as in winter.

“It’s important not to let the smart house take over your home and become a nuisance,” he says.

I agree. I will keep my home reassuringly stupid, thanks all the same. There are nobler — and more convenient — ways to deploy technology.