One of the main problems as I see it is that dumb devices have a long life and when they fail, they tend to hard fail. It either works, or it doesn’t. In contr

One of the main problems as I see it is that dumb devices have a long life and when they fail, they tend to hard fail. It either works, or it doesn’t. In contrast, smart devices have many soft failures. They work today and they don’t tomorrow. They fail for various reasons that are not under their direct control, and because of that they have a much larger mental overhead for me. For instance, I can shut the garage door with a traditional switch and be pretty certain it will close. Yes, they do stop working, but it is a hard, catastrophic event that makes me take notice and act. By contrast when a smart device fails, it can often fail silently and temporarily so I find myself constantly second guessing the thing I just did. “Did it work? Is the sensor showing me the correct state? Did it open on it’s own? I better go outside and check it.” I find myself thinking about said thing way more during the day than I used to. And this is fatiguing. Yes, it has some added benefit to automate certain tasks, but any benefit is wasted by the overall mental overhead it is adding back on me. Definitely not worth it except for trivial things from my experience.