> Every engineer is at least a little bit techno-utopian.
Funny how my career started in electronics and embedded software and one of the cool things I saw back then was smart home. It was before "IoT hype" and I really thought that controlling your lights or curtains remotely via XMPP is cool.
Now I'm building a house and hell no - I want to stay away of this crap, I want "dumb house" not smart. But still, technologically it's kind of cool
I was listening to just one episode of a Stacey Higginbotham's podcast about IoT with one of her colleagues on smart cities (one of her articles got featured here yesterday), and it didn't take long for them to lament the use case for IoT being creepy surveillance rather than dominated by cool and interesting open-source future dream home projects. I think the monetary value gained from surveillance is simply too great for executives to deny, and the monetary value gained from the IoT best-case is too weak for the market to supply... :/
It's overwhelmingly a work force of thwarted techno-utopians. And that means many of the disillusioned workers have crossed the floor to become techno-dystopians, possibly bordering on luddites towards the very tech they are creating, which is an extremely demoralizing position to be in.
Funny how my career started in electronics and embedded software and one of the cool things I saw back then was smart home. It was before "IoT hype" and I really thought that controlling your lights or curtains remotely via XMPP is cool. Now I'm building a house and hell no - I want to stay away of this crap, I want "dumb house" not smart. But still, technologically it's kind of cool