These things will actually end up conserving energy in great amounts.
Citation, please.
Or at least a clarification of what you mean by "advance."
If you like, here's an example from writer Wendell Berry:
"To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. 2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. 3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces. 4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces. 5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body. 6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools. 7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair. 9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html
(I don't expect everyone would necessarily share all these standards -- I suspect 10 in particular might be an issue for HN participants, for example --but they serve as an example and all of them have some merit.)
1. I don't care for change, everything is terrible as long as I can pick at least one problem.
3 and 9 clearly contradict! This is garbage.
Something that achieves 3 without sacrificing 9 is probably better (or at least more likely to be adopted) than something that achieves 3 but sacrifices 9.
But also, I think this thread entirely misses the point and intended use-case for this list.
When you cannot satisfy all criteria, the list does not become a justification for the status quo. Instead, it is a useful mechanism for elucidating the exact conflicts which a good designer must reason through and ultimately resolve (perhaps even leading to an alternative, "win-win" or "win-less lose" solution. Or not. Either way, the list helped think things through.)
9 is talking about aspects of people's lives.
"But what could someone who never uses a computer know about computers!?!" They could know what is lost when you use a computer, and, in general, you can't get that perspective from the Hacker News crowd (or nearly anyone under 30 or so). I don't agree with everything he writes (especially not the religious stuff), but he's very wise, I think.
If intrigued, one might try "The Unsettling of America" (1977), "What Are People For?" (1990) or "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community" (1993).
Opinions don't require citation.
Your list of requirements for technological innovation is somewhat suspect considering you're discussing it via a tremendously expensive international network of computers, which is mostly powered by coal-generated electricity, who you likely paid a multinational telecommunications company to access.
I don't know whether home automation will take off, but I think the deciding factor will be the same as it was with most of the other things we've invented since we came down from the trees: whether the benefits on the whole exceed the costs.
We do seem to have regressed because of the phenomena of “worse hardware through software”, and the over-dependence on cloud services.
I'm also much more skeptical that software version n is unambiguously better than version n-1, having been burned a few too many times (that's also why sites like this exists: http://www.oldversion.com/).