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Just look at how far wifi has come, only 15 years ago you couldn't imagine an office that could connect to the internet reliably without anything but RJ45 cables.

I still can't. When I'm at work, I plug in to wired Ethernet whenever possible. Otherwise, I get weird slowdown and dropouts all the time. I've done contract work at a number of business ranging from you've-definitely-heard-of-them Fortune 500 enterprises to local small businesses, and it's always the same. When I want a connection that's going to be reliable and consistent, (for example, when I'm taking a video call) I plug in a physical wire.

Read the comments on the internet from the 90s or early 2000s about almost anything and see how pessimistic everyone was about the future of new technologies. This is probably even more true of nerds who live on the cutting edge and see things at a closer range but also at a slightly skewed angle.

Many of those criticisms were absolutely correct. Stallman's worries about DRM have largely come to pass. We're living in a world where farmers can't repair their own tractors without taking out a service contract with John Deere. We're living in a new dark age where a large proportion of our visual cultural output, be it music, film or video games will be lost, simply because it isn't profitable for the original creating entity to preserve them, and copyright law prevents anyone else from doing so.

So what? Seatbelt laws induced the same type of reaction initially, but over time people adjusted, and no one even notices the annoying chime every car makes if you start it without putting on your seatbelt first

I do notice, and I find it annoying when my car insists that I put on my seatbelt, even when I'm just backing it out into the driveway so that I can wash it. I've noticed that newer cars detect when you've been driving for more than a certain amount of time (I think two hours is the threshold) and "advise" that you stop and take a break, regardless of your actual fatigue level. How long before this "advice" becomes more coercive?

An oven is not a PC, just turn on and cook my food. And any energy savings with some wifi controlled monstrosity (if thats what were getting at) is better met with more sustainable energy sources that produce more power. Cutting energy is never going to be a solution of the future; producing more will be.

Control doesn't have to be malicious. For example electric oven:

1) Oven or any other appliance can just list current price of electricity.

2) High power appliances can tell network to book energy (how much/how long) so usage is more predictable.

It is more likely we end up with camera taking photos of our food and sending it to mothership - but one can still wish it will go other way.

Neither of these should be mandatory (for #2 at least not yet)

> I think you're being needlessly pessimistic.

Is (s)he, though? electric cars stopping to load because of grid instabilities is a build-in mandatory feature in electric chargers in Europe. Which is a major part of why I got another petrol-powered car last month - it gives me the security that the car will be fuelled sufficiently for operations when I get to it in the morning.

2 - I'd say these comments were overly optimistic - had I told my 30 year younger me about how we were essentially dependant on large megacorps for our integrated mail/calendar/telephone needs, megacorps who can - and often do - kick users out randomly for no apparent reason, making them lose access to their digital identity not only with them, but with potentially hundreds of other organisations, how the idea of ownership would erode into perpetual renting which can be stopped by the media controller at any point with no prior warning, that he would 'buy' a digital book, but would be unable to read it because he happened to be abroad, how state governments were using hacking skills to eavesdrop on everyone and to plant evidence on computers... he would have thought I was reading too many cypherpunk novels.

The last 30 years in tech have made me utterly pessimistic about the sci-fi tech future. The only things that ever become true are the worst ones. A stove dictating me when to cook and for how long sounds like the least problem we will have in our future, even more boring dystopia.

I have begin to understand the folks who start to live off-grid in a cabin somewhere in Montana...

"Read the comments on the internet from the 90s or early 2000s about almost anything and see how pessimistic everyone was about the future of new technologies."

We live in a time, where allways on devices track and spy everything by default about everyone and secret algorithms decide what posts get viral and what gets blocked or banned automatically, with no chance for the ordinary person to contest these decisions.

And all of this gets used, to manipulate peoples attention to sell them shiny crap, or influence them politically, without them noticing.

But yeah, people adopted to that total surveillance and algorithm control and starting the day with tailored advertisement. Why resist the change of the glorious new age?

But apart from that, I absolutely would buy a wifi controlled smart oven, where I can check on food and maybe adjust temperature without going to the kitchen - but only if I control it and not some server in china or wherever.