"Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again."

There is a relevant difference though. The button to adjust the mirrors in my car carry no significant disadvantages, other than a very nebulous and easily-dischargeable moral hazard. (That is, even if you are worried about the "laziness" of using a button to set your mirrors, you can easily negate this simply by using the time or effort saved on some other worthy goal; even my great-grandpa couldn't really argue with that.)

But a lot of these "smart" devices carry several non-trivial disadvantages: Almost every one of them is actively spying on you; a non-trivial number of them are smart for the sole purpose of spying on you because there is no other current economic reason for the device to be smart. They generally add a dependency to an external cloud service, which in many cases has a shorter expected life span than the device itself. I'd submit that corporations would be far less enthusiastic about "smart devices" if they were not planning on abandoning them after a couple of years, and instead had to book a 10-20 year liability on to the books to account for future support, even just security updates for any network-attached devices that don't hook to a "cloud". They add interface complexity to what is often a relatively simple device, at least prior to its smartification. Some people may love their "smart lightswitches" but there's just no way to beat the light switch in terms of complexity.

I don't think the "you're just the old fogey of the future" argument here, along with frankly being a bit audience-hostile, works. I'd submit as further evidence for this that a lot of us who are most worried about all the smart devices and most resistant are the neophiles who have been surfing the cutting edge for a long time. I've been a neophile for a long time, and I can present evidence that I'm still a neophile in other contexts, but whoa, nelly, I'm not filling my house with this stuff. Even my phone and I have an uneasy relationship at times.

(I used to be excited about the thought of having a home robot for various tasks. But now I can expect that home robot to be hooked to the cloud, and literally spying on everything its sensors can get at, which is everything in my house, and turning the full "nudging" power of every company involved into manipulating me and sucking dollars out of my wallet with every scuzzy trick anyone has ever thought up. It'll bring the non-ad-blocked browser experience into the real world. I'm much less excited now. Perhaps I'll be able to afford to pay extra for the ones that don't do that, but we're still talking a social problem here for those who can't.)

Let me end with a re-iteration of the fact that the whole industry excitement about "smart" is almost certainly entirely predicated on those industry's fully-justified belief that they can toss a product out into the world, and abandon it the instant it ceases to be useful for milking their userbase of advertising dollars, which is "immediately" for some things like light bulbs. If the industry had to account for long-term support, the industries would be singing a completely different tune... how could a smart lightbulb carrying 10- or 20-year liabilities, often with a non-trivial black swan chance (think Mirai here) of requiring very swift and very serious reworking of the firmware, possibly compete with a dumb lightbulb where the companies only carry very calculable and relatively brief warrantee obligations? There's a non-trivial way in which this excitement about smart devices is predicated on screwing customers naive enough to buy these things.