One month ago I visited Trivandrum. It was a wonderful experience, in which I learned, or found confirmations of, a lot of good things about India. I also noticed one thing that made me a bit sad, though.

I refer to the printed version of the Hindu piece titled “Into the high-tech kitchen” (bigger version here:

Smart bins, pankake printers, smartphone-controlled cookers, AI-enabled refrigerators… high-tech stuff for sure, but does it deserve to be called “smart gadgets”? Those are all products that are almost guaranteed to be everything but really “smart”, even when they do something you did need: not interoperable, non-not upgradeable, non-integrated or otherwise compatible apps or user interfaces, designed for early obsolescence, doomed to become even more really toxic, hardly recyclable e-waste, .

If you are lucky, that is, and none of those gadgets ever leaks your email password or creates some serious safety issue, some day.

Smart kitchen? Not really. Western countries are already falling over this kind of scams. It was a bit sad to see the same invented need popping up in other countries too, with the same limits.

In general, whenever “Smart Homes” and/or the “Internet of Things (IoT)” come up, don’t forget that the biggest question about them is….