About this single point of failure business
We've all suffered through the sci-fi movie(s) where the intelligent house of the future turns on you. All of these systems have quite obvious system design shortcomings which invariably come down to a single point of failure and so no backup. After sitting through yet another of those movies I'd say "But then this would never happen in real life" but stories like this and personal experience from staying at my daughter's house suggests that we're doing it to ourselves. The fix is obvious -- when you design a system, no matter how trivial, you have to take into account error conditions and unit failure and you have to recognize that the more links you put in the chain the greater likelihood of something going wrong.
I work with industrial equipment, I'm used to automation. I still use light switches, key locks and the like. Its not that I don't like this new fangled stuff, I think it has amazing potential, but our house has to work from a *systems* perspective.
(About the daughter's house experience. Trivial, again. S-I-L had equipped the guest bedroom with an Echo and a smart plug to turn the bedside light on and off. He had written on the mirror the name of the plug and the system. Fair enough. Read the mirror, speak the incantation and off goes the light. Great. Now you need to turn it on a couple of hours later. Its dark. Spot the deliberate mistake.) (As deserving a mention is the Internet service went out later that night and literally everything stopped.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
