In Praise of a Dumb House

My husband Harry works in tech, and every January he makes his yearly pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where some 4,100 exhibitors are spread across 2.6 million square feet. The dominant concept at this year’s edition was that, very soon, anything you put in your house will be compatible with voice-activated AI services like Siri, Alexa, or HomePod. Your newest home automation systems will come equipped with sensors and jazzy master controls on an iPad.

The problem for me is that a tiny photoelectric cell you frantically wave to—rather than a switch to flick or press—rarely acknowledges me, because somehow I’m not human temperature. The same way my X-Men superpower is being completely invisible to bartenders at a party, I’m also not a good candidate to live in the alleged future home. From being locked out of my iPad for ten years to routinely spacing on my passwords—including for my password manager—I am riding the tech wave so poorly that my email is still @aol.com.

I want a dumb house.

Designer Thomas Yang, for one, is with me. “There is an honesty and an agency that comes with a light switch...a tactile action and interaction with the world of materials that is not dependent on a server,” he tells me. Personally, I also feel virtuous getting up from the couch to adjust the dimmer.

Harry got us a smart scale. That might seem innocuous enough—though I’m not thrilled by the idea of a hacker group blackmailing me every time I decide to indulge in an extra scoop of rocky road. A more rational fear: If your Wi-Fi happens to be down, sorry, you can’t find out how much you weigh that morning. Or open your front door. I miss keys. I like landlines that don’t heat up, potentially giving me an iPhone-shaped brain tumor. But that’s just the tip of the next gen’s digital iceberg.

This story is part of The Future of Home, a collaboration between the editors of WIRED and Architectural Digest to help you understand what “home” will look like tomorrow and beyond.

Shelly Palmer, a futurist who consults for Microsoft and other companies, spends his days explaining the trends in AI to corporate leadership. His much-circulated newsletter says there’s a quality gap between demo AI robotics and products that are available to ship, but the goal is what LG calls the “Zero Labor Home.” The South Korean government, meanwhile, has invested $770 million in humanoid robot development, predicting huge year-over-year growth. Unitree, a Chinese company, is marketing one for light industrial tasks. As far as I can tell, though, there is not yet a model that can load and unload the dishwasher, correctly sorting the flatware and neatly nesting the spoons. Besides, if I were home minding my own business and a fleet of robots were cleaning around me, I might have a panic attack—it sounds like being left vehicle-less in a bumper-cars rink. I’m just too old for a Jetsons’ world.

On the other hand, you must have seen that viral video of a robot waiter having a meltdown in a restaurant in Cupertino, California—home of Apple, of all places—or a reel of that Russian contraption face-plant during its much-hyped debut. When we see humanoids falter, fail, or freak out, we all laugh. Because it’s funny, of course, but also because we feel superior and they look stupid. For now. I’m not sure if we will keep cackling when our friends have robots who iron all the laundry—without complaint.