What the people who write these kind of videos never take into account is cost and ease of use. Nobody is going to install something in their house that costs a fortune, and nobody is going to install something that is hard to use, fussy, and breaks frequently, because it will have to be fixed or it is useless. Solar panels on the roof are a case in point.
If you look at house design from 400 years ago, and compare it with today's houses, you will get a pretty good idea of what houses will look like 400 years from today. Our houses are not much different from the houses of Shakespeare's time. In fact, many people still live in houses built while Shakespeare was alive. They are rectangular, solid, with windows that open in every room, doors mounted on hinges, wood and masonry construction.
Construction techniques have changed somewhat, but the end result is remarkably similar, from the perspective of use. The biggest change was bringing the outhouse inside the house via modern plumbing -- but the Romans had modern plumbing 2000 years ago. Another change is door size. Four centuries ago, doors were smaller, because people were shorter. All houses in the 16th century had fireplaces, and today only some houses have fireplaces ... but the fireplace is essentially unchanged. A wall is a wall, a floor is a floor, stairs are stairs, doors are doors, windows are windows.
Those houses that stand out, that look like the come from science fiction, are very hard to sell. Nobody wants to buy "the home of the future." They don't want to get stuck with a white elephant. That's why geodesic domes never really took off as houses. The people who built them found that they couldn't sell them, because nobody wanted to buy them. House design is conservative by its very nature.
The fireplace has changed quite a bit. Look at a house built in the 1700s/1800s. A fireplace was a giant open hearth, maybe 4ft tall. It was this way because you used it to cook, and it was used as the primary for heating. As central heating became more common in regular homes, the fireplace became smaller until it was nothing but a showpiece that will suck more heat out than it puts in to to the room. In order to get the same benefit our great-great-great grandparents did, we need an insert that doesn't allow the heat being generated to suck itself up the chimney.
But it's still a brick hole in the wall that you burn shit in, so it's primary method of operation remains the same.
That's a good point. Also some of the tech that the video talks about do have similarities to the current day smart home. Like a smart thermostat that knows when you're not home and it'll adjust the temperature up or down to use less energy, that's probably the idea they were going for with the auto lights.
(post is archived)