A short review of home automation

We have been tinkering with home automation. Just dipping a toe. Our spare room is separated from the house by a couple of rooms and a set of stairs. A cosy hidaway but also badly thought out in terms of power and light switches. Going to bed, for a guest, is like one of those fiendish interview puzzles. You have to go turn on a light, go to the next one, turn that on, go back turn the other one off, rinse and repeat. So we decided to improve the Night Orchard experience so that if anyone ever visits us again, they will have some hi-tech support. Our conclusion is that the tech is not quite ready yet. Last week I was allegedy exposed to someone with the virus, so I spent a night in the spare room. This morning I managed to get something as complex as 'play scheherazade on the spare room speakers' to work perfectly, but the system responded to 'desk' with a soliloquy on death. I found the experience strangely profound under the circumstances. It seems that our automated future may be more poetic than expected, but perhaps our digital slaves are not going to be as dispassionate as we think.