These things will actually end up conserving energy in great amounts.
Citation, please.
Or at least a clarification of what you mean by "advance."
If you like, here's an example from writer Wendell Berry:
"To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. 2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. 3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces. 4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces. 5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body. 6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools. 7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair. 9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html
(I don't expect everyone would necessarily share all these standards -- I suspect 10 in particular might be an issue for HN participants, for example --but they serve as an example and all of them have some merit.)
Opinions don't require citation.
Your list of requirements for technological innovation is somewhat suspect considering you're discussing it via a tremendously expensive international network of computers, which is mostly powered by coal-generated electricity, who you likely paid a multinational telecommunications company to access.
"But what could someone who never uses a computer know about computers!?!" They could know what is lost when you use a computer, and, in general, you can't get that perspective from the Hacker News crowd (or nearly anyone under 30 or so). I don't agree with everything he writes (especially not the religious stuff), but he's very wise, I think.
If intrigued, one might try "The Unsettling of America" (1977), "What Are People For?" (1990) or "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community" (1993).
I don't know whether home automation will take off, but I think the deciding factor will be the same as it was with most of the other things we've invented since we came down from the trees: whether the benefits on the whole exceed the costs.
We do seem to have regressed because of the phenomena of “worse hardware through software”, and the over-dependence on cloud services.
I'm also much more skeptical that software version n is unambiguously better than version n-1, having been burned a few too many times (that's also why sites like this exists: http://www.oldversion.com/).
1. I don't care for change, everything is terrible as long as I can pick at least one problem.
3 and 9 clearly contradict! This is garbage.
Something that achieves 3 without sacrificing 9 is probably better (or at least more likely to be adopted) than something that achieves 3 but sacrifices 9.
But also, I think this thread entirely misses the point and intended use-case for this list.
When you cannot satisfy all criteria, the list does not become a justification for the status quo. Instead, it is a useful mechanism for elucidating the exact conflicts which a good designer must reason through and ultimately resolve (perhaps even leading to an alternative, "win-win" or "win-less lose" solution. Or not. Either way, the list helped think things through.)
9 is talking about aspects of people's lives.
I live in a 1200 sq foot condo, 1 floor, with limited natural light. Automated lighting activation via Bluetooth LE (Tasker on my Android phone) is very handy when I come home late at night, because walking through ~15 feet in the dark to a light switch isn't fun (yes, first world problem).
More importantly, my Nest thermostat. Am I lazy for changing the house temp from my bed? Most definitely. But that's not the point. I have saved quite a bit in utilities with its auto-away functionality, as well as its airwave cooling function (detects how long it can keep cooling the home from residual coolness in the air exchanger coils after the compressor has shut down).
Energy efficiency plays (Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion) turns tech companies into utility MVNOs. And almost everyone needs some form of power or HVAC.
But, all of this nifty tech does rely on tapping in to home infrastructure (switches and devices that understand the protocol), so it's a long haul.
These devices are wired in and have 50-year design lives. The life of these protocols seems to be significantly less than 50 years, which is a pretty big mismatch.
Yes, I'm still sore about the ~10 useless X-10 switches I put in in the 2000s. ;-)
But you're absolutely right. It's hard to sell incrementally useful capability when it requires spending a fair bit of time and money to upgrade components that are doing a decent job today and probably will for years to come.
Case in point. Would I buy a Nest if I needed a thermostat today? Probably. Will I buy one to replace a perfectly good programmable thermostat that's already installed and working? Probably not.
Blinds that automatically open/shut based on time of day and internal/external temperatures to prevent against heat loss during winter. I'd be keen on that as it's not something my wife ever considers. At the front of the house, we have six windows in two rooms, all with separate blind controls. What I'd give to automate the process of opening those in the morning and closing them at night...
Microwaves that switch off standby (ultimately uses more power than actually cooking something) once it learns which hours you tend to use it. Garden lighting systems, irrigation systems that can check the weather via your phone and adjust schedules if it's going to rain, etc.
edit: comma removal
Or maybe one might want to lock the font door from the office when one left in a hurry to get to the meeting on time?