Everything Is "Smart" Now Except the Things That Matter

My lightbulb can shift through sixteen million colours to match my mood. My internet connection still falls over the moment it rains slightly harder than usual. Somewhere, priorities got scrambled, and I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge of deciding which problems are worth solving.

The flashy problems get solved first

It's not that clever people ran out of things to fix — it's that "smart" features sell well in a showroom. A mood-lighting bulb demos beautifully. A router that doesn't drop out in a storm doesn't demo at all; it just quietly works, which is much harder to put in an advert.

Convenience versus reliability

A lot of "smart" upgrades add a genuinely nice extra feature on top of a device, without necessarily making the core job of that device any more reliable. The boring, unglamorous engineering — better cabling, sturdier connections, parts that don't fail in a light drizzle — rarely gets the same attention, because it doesn't look like progress. It just looks like things not breaking, which nobody notices until it stops being true.

What Gary actually wants from technology

• Devices that do the basic job first, and the clever extra second.
• Fewer features I never asked for, more reliability in the one feature I did.
• An off switch that is an actual physical switch, not a menu four taps deep.

I don't need my kettle to know my star sign. I need my internet to survive a bit of rain. Somewhere between those two requests is a perfectly reasonable amount of technology, and nobody seems to be building for it. Until then, I'll be here, glaring at a very colourful lightbulb during yet another outage.