As a child, I remember hearing about heat-seeking missiles on the news. The missiles were often mentioned on television, so perhaps the missiles were more attention seeking than heat seeking. I was reminded of the attention-seeking missiles on a recent visit to a house that was supposed to be a vision of the home of the future. Inside, it had a series of extremely attention-seeking, programmable electric switches that could be turned on and off in a variety of ways. There were faucets that could measure how much water was used, computerized panels in the kitchen, video telephones, and video surveillance of the children’s bedrooms and other areas. The interior of the house was a good example of an engineer-project, since it was arranged more for the purpose of displaying the potential of technology than for creating a beautiful and cozy home. The house had the look and feel of an operating room in a modern hospital. In reality, all its technological features had as many disadvantages as advantages. There was a central vacuum cleaning system where you attached the hose to an outlet in the room you wished to clean. But if something got stuck inside the system there was a risk of having to break open the walls in order to find the place where the hose was clogged. Most people would probably need a special course in order to use the programmable electric switches, even though there was a video showing a white-smocked engineer instructing a housewife in how to program them. The switches could be programmed to turn the lighting up and down, give a burglar the illusion that there was always someone home, or go on when someone entered a room. I once stayed at a hotel with this kind of light switch. The light went on by itself when I went into the bedroom. I lay down in bed to read a book and the light went off. As a result of this I had to raise my hand every few moments in order to keep the reading light on.
Standing in the “house of the future”, I became convinced that this house had no future. Maybe the kitchen tap was smart with its buttons and light displays, but didn’t work if your hands were dirty – which they tend to be when using a kitchen tap. And if the power went out, so did the water supply. As far as I could see, video surveillance of children’s bedrooms could create more stress than peace of mind. Are there really any parents who want to keep a constant eye on their kids with a video camera? Shouldn’t the children of the future have an occasional chance to be alone? Shouldn’t they have the chance to do things without the chance of hearing their parent’s voice over the intercom?
                   “Hey! What are you doing in there?”
                   “But, Dad, we’re just playing chess.”
                   “Well … You looked so sneaky … Hey! What are you doing now?”
                   “I was just moving a chess piece, Dad.”
                      “That was really a dumb move – you should have moved the queen instead.”

What’s the limit to how much electronic hardware we can be bothered to have inside our home? Should the home of the future be a place where all attention is drawn to switches and fascinating help facilities? In science fiction movies we see how much time people spend servicing technology’s whims and brooding over its complex terminology. For years scientists have been saying that technology will assure us a future where the world is very simple. The road to this simplicity, however, seems extremely complicated.
                   Maybe in the future we’ll be subjected to ovens and stoves that go on automatically when they hear a stomach growl or beds that pop out of the wall when someone yawns. Who knows? Perhaps one day we’ll have a TV that goes on when you look at it and goes off when you fall asleep. This might be a good idea unless more than one person is watching television at the same time: ”Grandma, if you fall asleep one more time while the football championship is on, I’m going to roll you and your wheelchair into the closet!”

Recently I was sitting in a little house in the country. One of the windows was broken, causing the wind to howl when it blew through the crack. A wood burning stove in the living room made that room much warmer than the others. There was a well-worn sofa, uneven floorboards and a smell of fresh wood from the woodpile just outside the door. It wasn’t hard to notice that the little house had something the house of the future didn’t have: atmosphere, personality, simplicity and charm. In other words, it had all the things that the developers proclaimed were their goals for the house of the future. Naturally, not everyone wants to live in a little, lopsided house in the country. Still, there’s no doubt that modern-day, mass-produced homes give little room for a healthy interior milieu. The smooth, infallible surfaces in the house of the future cannot tolerate minor defects or scratches. Modern homes are no longer built - they’re assembled in no time from pre-fabricated modules. Visiting the house of the future made it very clear that technological development, in reality, is just the replacement of one disadvantage with another.