Smart Home or Smart Life?

I have a smart home.

I’m not talking about a couple of light bulbs that I can turn pink from my phone, although I can do that too. I mean a properly smart home, the sort of home that has developed into such a complicated collection of sensors, switches, computers and automations that occasionally I find myself having to fix a problem that simply wouldn’t have existed had I not tried to make my home intelligent in the first place.  This is apparently progress.

There are sensors that know when I enter a room. Lights know when they should come on and, perhaps more importantly, when they should go off. My heating understands which rooms are occupied. I can see how much electricity I’m using. My network consists of enough equipment that I now have something resembling a small corporate IT department living inside a cabinet.

I have even recently begun dismantling perfectly functional Amazon Smartspeakers and converting them into my own voice assistants. I call them Bishop.  Why? Well, that’s probably another passage entirely.

I’ve always enjoyed technology and I like solving problems. There is something deeply satisfying about discovering that something doesn’t work, working out why it doesn’t work and then making it work.  Sometimes, of course, the problem is utterly pointless.

Nobody really needs a house to know they’ve walked into the kitchen. For hundreds of years humans successfully navigated this particular problem by reaching towards a wall and pressing a switch.  But where’s the fun in that?  Recently though, I’ve started to wonder whether my smart home is doing something else for me.

Because my house is predictable.  If a light doesn’t come on, there is a reason.  Perhaps an automation hasn’t fired, or a presence sensor hasn’t detected me. Perhaps the Zigbee network is playing up or some software update has broken something that worked perfectly well yesterday.  It can be frustrating, but somewhere buried amongst the event logs, settings and little blinking boxes is an answer.  There is always an answer, and I’m thankful for that.

People, I am discovering, are not nearly so considerate.

I unexpectedly became single in my forties after fifteen years of marriage. A few years later I find myself approaching fifty and participating once again in the strange ritual we call dating.  Except dating isn’t quite how I remember it.

We now carry around a six-inch illuminated catalogue of other human beings. With a movement of our thumb we can decide that somebody is too short, too tall, lives three miles too far away, owns too many dogs, travels too much, doesn’t travel enough or has inexplicably decided that holding a large fish is the photograph most likely to attract a life partner.  Then occasionally, amongst all this human shopping, you meet somebody.  And that’s when everything becomes considerably less smart.

A woman can sit opposite you for hours, laugh with you, share stories with you and kiss you goodnight.

Your brain quite reasonably records this as: Things are going well.

Unfortunately there is no entity in Home Assistant for this.  There is no little green icon marked Mutual Attraction: Connected.   Nobody sends a notification saying:  Warning: emotional availability has become unavailable.

There are no event logs.  Believe me, I would check them.

Instead there are messages. Or sometimes there aren’t messages, which somehow contain considerably more information than the one that pinged in your inbox.  And this is perhaps where my smart home and my increasingly ridiculous collection of technology projects have started to make a little more sense to me.  I can control them.

Over recent months, while my romantic life has bounced between moments of extraordinary excitement and rather more frequent periods of staring suspiciously at my phone, my house has become increasingly sophisticated.  Networks have been rebuilt. Cabinets have been modified. Sensors have been hidden. Voice assistants have been created.  There is something comforting about a problem that accepts being solved.

Human beings stubbornly refuse to do this.

You can be kind. You can be attentive. You can make somebody laugh. You can give them space. You can tell them exactly how you feel.  And none of that creates an obligation for them to feel the same way.  Nor should it.  That’s the annoying bit.

Somewhere amongst all this I met someone who, for reasons I’m still not entirely able to explain, got through the defences.  She wasn’t in my life for very long.  In the scale of a lifetime she barely stood in the doorway.  But sometimes somebody doesn’t need to unpack their bags to change the shape of a room.

She had an energy that captivated me. And then she turned away. Logic tells me to turn the other way too. 

There are, after all, several billion other people on the planet. There are even new souls entering my little corner of it.  Some are funny.  Some are beautiful.  Some seem genuinely interested in me.

And yet occasionally I find myself looking back towards that doorway.  I wonder whether she ever looks back too.  There is no sensor for that.  No automation I can write.  No amount of engineering can make somebody think about you.

And perhaps that’s the point I’ve been avoiding. A smart home is usually described as a home in which technology makes life easier. Lights that turn themselves on. Heating that anticipates your arrival. Doors that know when to lock.  But perhaps mine has become something slightly different.  It is the place where I control the things I can control.

Because outside these walls are children growing older, relationships changing, people arriving, people leaving and a future stubbornly refusing to publish its specification sheet.  Inside, when I walk into a room, the light comes on.  Almost every single time.

And yet, for all the technology I’ve put into this house, I realise now that I’ve never really wanted a home that knows when I’m there.  I want someone, somewhere, to notice when I’m not.