As a kid I loved the Disney movie Smart House. Looking back I think the creators meant it to be more of a warning about the future of technology and what might happen if we replace the holes in our hearts with material goods. I pretty much ignored the ending of the movie where Katey Sagal goes coo coo because my childhood wonder couldn’t stop thinking about what my future would be like. Would we have similar technologies? Will cars become flying machines? Could I replace my own mother with Katey Sagal and her perfectly baked chocolate chip cookies when I was mad? No, of course I wouldn’t want to do that last one, but at the time, whenever I was grounded, it was a tempting dream.

The idea of giving voice commands to start the dishwasher or make a snack was alien technology that my young brain went wild with. I thought I would never live to see the day where technology could resemble such a reality.

Fast forward a decade (plus a few more years I won’t say how many) and I’m helping my husband set up Alexa in our apartment. We set up smart bulbs so we could tell her to turn our lights on and off as well as the TV. Of course that’s about all we could afford and is quite lacking compared to Ben Cooper’s life. Now, there are even more technologies that can be connected like dishwashers, ovens, washers and dryers, and so much more.

Both my husband and I love that kind of stuff, so we like to pay attention online or through friends when new technologies come out. Unfortunately, due to budget restrictions we find ourselves living a more archaic life compared to that of Ben Cooper in Smart House. I would still say that we are in the implementation stage due to financial restrictions. I hesitate to say that we are in the confirmation stage because we can only employ smart home technology in very small ways here and there. As of right now, if we could make more of our home “smart” we definitely would. Without being able to do more it’s a little hard to say whether or not we would fully adopt such technologies. Otherwise, we would be early majority when it comes to smart home technology. We will most likely find ourselves in the confirmation stage as we increase our economic status.