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Comment by belgianguy | Hacker News Reader

smart phone > smart car > smart house > ... ? ... > smart human

I for one see great areas of improvement and possibilities inside the common house. Not that I'd wire up every appliance with a Wi-Fi sensor, but some data can be useful, if only for safety (falling asleep with the oven on: here a sensor could cut the power at a certain condition, or trigger the fire alarm, or ring up the firefighters).

Or you left the house and realise you left some of the lights on, just tell the in-car console to open the domotics app, and tell it to shut the lights off.

And the smart fridge, if RFIDs or its successor ever become cheap enough to be able to be printed on a milk carton, you could have your fridge's contents with you wherever you go, just open the app, look what's about to go off, or have it remind you to get extra supplies when you're near a point of interest.

If they'll let me I'll hook up a Nagios server to my coffee machine.

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I know this makes me sound like a terrible luddite or hipster or both, but I've been thinking about all of these smart devices and services and how they may have a somewhat infantalizing impact on people.

I recently met with some people behind a startup built entirely around generating meal plans for you. I understand that it's a useful service (for some types of people). But I worry about the implication that we are now a species that can't even figure out what to eat for ourselves.

Please educate yourself on choice paralysis and its implications, learn about the fundamental reasons (cognitive capacity, cognitive bias, etc) and only then worry about our wonderful, adapting, intelligent species.

I know you're trying to be helpful, but "please educate yourself" is almost never a constructive or helpful phrase.

We can do better than that here.

Yeah, honestly, I wasn't entirely constructive and that was wrong.

I was irritated by your "...we are now a species that can't even figure out what to eat for ourselves...". It is certainly only my interpretation, but your comment wasn't unlike CNN headline blowing out of proportion another piece of trite consumer business.

Btw, no "we" (as in HN community) can't do better than that, as evidenced by multiples of such posts and comments.

Well, that depends on your point of view. In your case, we let outside factors start having a majority say in decisions we used to make ourselves. In essence, you're fearing that we're handing away control of our lives to data models and analyzing algorithms. Go figure that I often use Google to check the spelling/usage of words/idioms, rather than learning it by heart.

Or in a more poetic form: We're all turning into computers, a bit each day.

But in my view, I see it more as an enrichment of the status quo, meaning making optimal use of (useful, not NSA-like) data-gathering sensors we have at our disposal and the data points we could glean from them. As the data was always there, we (until shortly) never showed interest in it. And a lot of it might very well be uninteresting, but if some of it enriches or simplifies a certain task in our daily lives in a meaningful way, it'd be well worth it in my opinion.

We can figure out what to eat. But it takes time. Imagine that you want to personalize your diet. Take certain ammounts of protein, calories, fat, etc... It would take lots of time if you would prepare a weekly plan for yourself. Thats a good Idea.

But I do feel what you'r expressing, like we need an app to do everything.

But I much rather live with these little apps and have lots of good information than to live completly oblivious to everything like my grandads (kind'of. I still have my hippie moments).

I don't know, it might be nudging you to being oblivious in a different direction. Encapsulation is generally about ignorance, and if you have a robot designing your macro-nutrient intake for you, then you can wind up oblivious to what is actually in your food.

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