The proliferation of 'smart-' things is the equivalent of deferring everything to runtime, and throwing out design and planning and replacing it with a reactive (or perhaps more accurately reactionary) approach.

Interpreted languages are nice, but compiled languages have enormous advantages, especially when problems are well understood. City planning, the design of public spaces, thoughtful zoning, etc. is like the compiler. If you want an efficient city, you probably don't want it to only run as an interpreter.

Somehow this evokes the depths of American anti-intellectualism for me. "We don't need to understand anything, we can just measure it and then understand it!" without so much as a pause to wonder whether an understanding of the problem might already exist in such a way that it can be incorporated into the design, and further, that if you don't already understand 'it' then there is a good chance that you will end up building a device that measures the wrong things and that you can't change easily.