[paulojreis]

> "The number of smart devices is going to explode (...)"

But why? Why are you/they so sure? Why do we assume that humans will just appropriate any kind of technology thrown at them?

I assume this comes from educated tech guys, who are thorough with their work, tools and respective usage. How can they be so lighthearted with the premises which relate to human usage of technology?

[cell303]

This is a rather unusual comment and this link is probably the wrong place to have this conversation, as hacker news is probably the wrong place in general.

Anyway, it's rather simple. It's just taking what we have seen in the past (people appropriating any kind of technology thrown at them [1]) and extending it into the future.

Is this the correct approach? Probably not.

I like to remind myself that there was a time when smoking was the thing to do. Little knowledge about potential dangers was available. Projections about future adaption of the habit might have looked similar.

[1]: Strictly speaking this is not true, since there is a huge cemetery of rejected technology that remains mostly invisible. Smartphones just turn out to be one of the technologies that have become widely accepted, creating a wrong impression overall.

[tree_of_item]

I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology". The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things, and collect lots of data. It'd be great if I could ask my stove what food I've eaten this month, how healthy it was, how expensive it was, maybe even tell it to start preparing dinner at a certain time. The way to do that is to put a computer in everything.

[paulojreis]

> I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology".

People accepting, wanting, using and integrating said technology in everyday life.

> The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things

This is precisely what I'm questioning. "We want"? How can you know that? I believe you want that, I believe that maybe people in your circles do, too. Still, that is no evidence at all to extrapolate that "we want".

[nine_k]

There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells.

Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a button explaining approximately what type of clothes are there, and walk away. The machine figures the rest.

This is a type of liberation people seem to actually like.

Also, people usually don't like uncertainty puzzling new experiences. Letting people on a stop see where the bus is does make people happier. (Myself I use a mobile web site that shows real-time position of NYC buses, and can attest to that.) If you walk into an unfamiliar store, especially abroad, it could take some time to find simplest items like a bottle of water. If there was a more-or-less unified 'online' interface for finding things in this particular store on your phone, it would make many tourists happier.

[vertex-four]

> Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a button explaining approximately what type of clothes are there, and walk away. The machine figures the rest.

I'm in the UK, and am rather middle-class, sort of. At the least, we don't have to worry about money much, and if I want to travel half way across the UK, I don't have to think much about it. I've just booked a film a day for the next week at a film festival.

On the other hand... I've literally never seen smart versions of these machines. I've barely ever seen a dishwasher outside a bar or restaurant, I've never seen an "automatic cooker", washing machines are generally much the same as they were 20 years ago, and robot vacuum cleaners are decidedly still a futuristic thing - most vacuum cleaners are, at their core, the same sort of thing we had 20 years ago with a new shell.

Perhaps these things are a lot more common in the US, and possibly in more upmarket parts of the UK, but I'd quite happily suggest that the vast majority of people are not aching to buy a smarter washing machine.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I wonder if it's simply the case that they are more popular in the US. Every house I have lived in has had a dishwasher (some are smart enough to figure out when dishes are clean and stop, instead of just using a timer), and it's generally expected that apartments will have one also.

Washing machines typically have settings for the type of clothes that are inside. And while I've never used one, the robotic Roomba vacuums are cheap and seem to be pretty popular.

If it is indeed the case that uptake of these items is much higher in the US, it would be very interesting to understand why. I doubt very much that it's cost since they're available at multiple price points. Maybe it's something like the reason why essentially no US homes have an electric kettle while essentially no UK homes don't have one. IOW, it's cultural!

[paulojreis]

> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. > > Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted.

Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I mean: it is rather "easy" to see a big increase in sales for a given technology, when it is "young". The big question is how sustained that growth will be, when the early adopters are served and the company needs to target "regular" people.

[sp332]

I thought it was pretty obvious, but here are some numbers for you. According to http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N... over 300,000 people had installed the Crock-Pot app for iOS by 2010. It costs $3.99 so that's $399,000 in app sales, plus whatever happened in the last 4 years.

Around 75% of homes in the US have a dishwasher. Nearly 20 million dishwashers are sold in the USA each year. http://qz.com/29147/death-of-a-dishwasher-families-around-th... For comparison, only 5 million homes are sold in the US each year, so it's not just that they come with houses and are never used.

[NovaS1X]

>And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I don't think it matters. The future of smart-devices is looking good of a number of reasons and this is why more than a few people think that smart-devices are going to see widespread adoption.

"Everyday people" don't need to be the ones adopting this widely just yet. There's a trend in the evolution of technology where people don't know that they want/need a specific technology until they've been shown the power of it. "Everyday people" never asked for Home PCs; they were pushed to them and now it's hard to imagine life without a home computer. "Everyday people" never asked for smartphones; they were pushed by technology companies and now they're almost a mandatory device for navigating modern culture.

I think smart-devices will see the same fate. There is a lot of talk and development into IoT and technologists see the power of such networks even if "everyday people" do not. Smart-devices are a natural progression of IoT and the other devices everyone already has in their pockets. I think it will be adopted in the same way other technologies have: It will see small, and then large-scale adoption in a niche area, people will see the power of IoT and smart-devices, and then people will begin to want it everywhere. This will be driven by technologist support and marketing.

The article may have presented the outcome a little optimistic but I don't then they're far off the mark.

[xg15]

This was certainly true for the past, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate for the future. The events of the recent years have given the public not just a sense of the power of technology but also its negative side.

At least here in germany, the Snowden relevations have done a good deal to make people realize just much much data about them is on their net and how hard it is to control access to it.

Revelations like Apple using iPhones for large scale profiling of location histories and (much later) Samsung having its TVs report home with a history of viewed programs didn't put smart devices in a good light either.

In parallel, numerous hacker and data leak scandals taught the public that maybe data entrusted to the cloud isn't as secure as everyone promised.

Finally, many people only now start to realize just how much a paradigm shift the internet really caused and what some of the psychological and sociological implications might be: There is the (still vaguely defined) "internet" or "mobile addiction", there is the growing trend of viewing phone usage (or usage of other devices, i.e. Google Glass) during social gatherings as impolite, there is the whole discussion about what role privacy should play in the future, etc, etc.

All of this doesn't stop people from buying new phones, TVs, fitness bands, etc. But depending on who you ask, they do it with a growing bad conscience. If you try to introduce new technologies that have a higher cost and less obvious benefits (like smart homes), it might have an effect.

[cell303]

What sales figures won't tell you though is how well people are doing who choose not to buy or can't afford those things.

Also, your argument does not account for tomorrows sales figures, which might look very different, as executives from any industry that software has replaced can tell you. Of course that could never happen to us.

[TeMPOraL]

Because time and again history proves a point that a surprising amount of smart people keep missing - that technology works on Blub paradox. People will use everything you throw at them, so you can't assume that "no one wants to use feature X". If you build it and ship it and make people buy it (hello advertising), they will use it, for things you haven't even thought of.

> I believe you want that, I believe that maybe people in your circles do, too. Still, that is no evidence at all to extrapolate that "we want".

There are three kinds of people. A small group that wants to automate stuff, a smaller group that doesn't want to automate stuff, and the majority who just mindlessly buys whatever is in stores today. You think people wanted smartphones? The tech crowd, maybe. But the rest? They just started buying them as mobile networks rolled them in to their offers.

[jpindar]

People and businesses are paying money - sometimes a great deal of money - for smart devices. That's a pretty good indication that they want them.

[xg15]

Who is "we"?