"Connecting your fire alarms to the internet will, at some point, result in someone setting all your alarms off at 2am just to fuck with you."
I disagree. The "at some point" argument can be applied to anything. Having a smartphone connected to the internet will, at some point, result in someone hacking into your phone and calling 911 using your phone number, tens times a day. At some point, it's going to happen to someone.
By your argument, we should ban smartphones because they are not 100% secure. Phones should just be phones, and web browsers should be separate devices. Phones should not be internet accessible because then they can be hacked into.
Let's not make personal attacks here. Focus on the issue, not the person. Whether or not I am illiterate is not what we're debating here, and quite frankly, is none of your concern for the sake of this thread.
Back before smartphones became popular, everyone I knew used to make the same argument for phones. "Do phones gain tangible benefits from being smart?" "Sure, you can check email on your phone, but I can do that at home--I don't want to check email on my phone" "I'd rather have a small flip phone than a huge PDA--too bulky to fit in my pocket."
If Steve Jobs held the same attitude, smartphones wouldn't be the industry it is today. It would still just be an idea, being dismissed as "a toy" and not useful
Have you used a kettle that is smart? I assume you must have given the conviction in the way you dismiss IoT as not useful. What pros / cons have you experienced from using a smart kettle that led you to dismiss it as being not useful? Was the smart kettle you were using designed well? How could it have been improved?
I was calling you out on the worlds most obvious straw man. Would you rather I just call you a liar, instead?
>Have you used a kettle that is smart? I assume you must have given the conviction in the way you dismiss IoT as not useful.
It's not a sensible funding allocation decision to attempt to make everything smart on the off chance that it might make it better. Smart pegs? Smart carrots?
Generally, in the real world, we theorycraft before we invest using that miracle of nature, our ability to model and predict the future in our heads.
Provide for me a tangible way that a kettle might be improved by being made smart, because my theorycrafting is coming up blank.
I'm willing to be shown wrong, but I will compare any benefits you vision bestows against any downsides it may introduce.
> I was calling you out on the worlds most obvious straw man. Would you rather I just call you a liar, instead?
I'd rather you not call me anything. As I said, it doesn't matter who I am. That's not the issue I'm interested in.
Likewise, I have not called you any names--I care only about the arguments you make.
> in the real world, we theorycraft before we invest using that miracle of nature, our ability to model and predict the future in our heads.
That is my point. If we only invest in making anything we can predict will succeed, and avoid potential failures, a device like a smartphone would not have existed, because I was there when companies like Apple tried to launch PDAs like the Newton, and the world did not care. Based on prediction, smartphones would not gain traction in the consumer market. And yet, the iPhone made that happen
Same for iPods--"Hundreds of dollars for a music player? Everyone would get a $30 sony". It was only with a lot of conviction pushing a "theoretically blank" idea, that the smartphone industry became what it is today.
If we only invest in things that seem "not dumb" in "theorycraft", a lot of the successful startups today would not exist. Success requires experimenting on things that may not seem obvious at first.
> Amaze me.
1. I don't need to amaze you. You as an individual are not that important.
This is especially true if you are the type of person who sits and waits to be amazed. The most important people in the world go out and amaze others, as opposed to waiting to be amazed by others
2. Ideas are not dumb until they are proven good. They are ideas until proven wrong. You don't get to dismiss an idea with near-certainty that they are "dumb", until you've actually tried it out yourself and can prove that it doesn't work.
> I'm willing to be shown wrong
That is not true. Someone who is willing to be shown wrong, would encourage others to try new ideas, even ones that are not apparent successes "in theory", or "dumb"
From the conversation so far, it sounds like you are not supportive of investing in ideas that are not proven in theorycraft. Based on the conversation alone, and the trust you put in theorycraft, it does not look like you want to be proven wrong.
I disagree. The "at some point" argument can be applied to anything. Having a smartphone connected to the internet will, at some point, result in someone hacking into your phone and calling 911 using your phone number, tens times a day. At some point, it's going to happen to someone.
By your argument, we should ban smartphones because they are not 100% secure. Phones should just be phones, and web browsers should be separate devices. Phones should not be internet accessible because then they can be hacked into.