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This is the weird part about the internet of things. No one has any generalized rule for differentiating which things should be smart, and which things should stay dumb. One thing that consistently jumps out at me, though, is the lack of legitimate consumer demand. The motives for buying smart devices are shallow, for the individual. Trying out new toys with disposable income, purely out of boredom, tends to sum up why most people opt for slightly smarter dumb things. I can think of many powerful applications for smart devices, and almost none of them are in the home. Parking garages, or almost anything transportation related, short term lockers at public places like gyms, any hospitality setting, where nothing actually belongs to an individual, but routine maintenance is required. Any vending machine is kind of already on the internet. Break rooms in office settings, and so on. In some respects, I don't even want my desktop computer to be an autonomous internet enabled device, and it's the smartest thing I own. I don't regard it as a reliable server of information. I don't want anything personal to become a reliable server of information, because any information it might serve is almost assuredly, implicitly personal. |