Smart homes acquire cheaper intelligence

Fail safe control design has always been a problem for automatic systems, just as rigorous scientific testing has always been the proof for the safety of new domestic products.

New inventions like the self-replicating materials are scary enough. Self-replicating as in automatically producing a replica of the original without going through a gestation period - well, a long gestation period anyway.

The relevant excerpt for the new patent on self-replicating materials is as follows:

[.....Chaikin and colleagues point out that these techniques can be used to build with micrometre-sized particles of plastic, glass or metal, by coating them with DNA. Using the right sequences, they can induce such particles to assemble themselves into complex objects.

These assemblies can in turn self-replicate by corralling other DNA-tagged particles into more versions of the same thing. Heating and cooling the mixture can forge or break the DNA bonds, and chemicals can be used to modify the binding sequences in between each round of replication so as to produce very complex structures....]

Wow. talk about in vitro housing! So, we are back to smart homes. A smart home is one in which:

[.....Every effort has been made in the design of the house to ensure that it works in the same or a similar manner to other houses. So pushing a door will still open it and clicking a light switch will still turn the light on or off. However the house can also be operated in a variety of other ways that may be more useful or appropriate for the person living there.....]

So, in your smart home, you could clap your hands to get the lights on without touching a switch or the security lights come on only when the monitoring system senses movement outside or within a room in order to conserve electric power...

That was yesterday. Now, there are or will soon be quite intelligent homes, the ones that can be described thus:

[....Lights and heat automatically turn on as your car approaches. The floor senses the fall of an elderly loved one and calls for help....

......Instead of digging through our closets to find the perfect complement for a new shirt, we may hold it up to our bedroom mirror for a computer to scan. Using radio-frequency identification technology, our electronic fashion stylist will then offer suggestions based on what's in our closet or how the latest edition of Vogue or Teen Beat pairs up something similar....

......Some of the first home automation systems to hit the market were priced at $35,000 to $45,000....... Today, similar systems might cost $2,500, he added.....]

Ha-ha....Wait till you get into the 'green' bathroom of an intelligent home and there is power failure because of a downed electric pole and a garden rodent has chewed away at the cable for the backup power system.

Hee-hee....'stuck' would be such a nice word for such a situation....Give me a house with a dumb waiter any day, if they are still popular that is....

Yes, I quite agree with the conclusion of MIT's Kent Larson, "The goal of home technology.....should be to make people smarter — not to make their homes smarter. "

Two examples of intelligent homes can be found today as a concept home in Microsoft's hometown of Redmond, Washington State and the other is a functioning prototype at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.