It's interesting to look back at the times when these concepts and sci-fi lit were written.

A lot of it was in the postwar period. You had a booming population that offered the opportunity for easy corporate revenue growth. If you wanted to make more money, you just sold your good or service to a person who didn't have it yet. That was simple enough because there were people - a lot of them - aging into your market. Let's say that the microwave was the smart home appliance of the late 60s/early 70s. You want to sell them. Well, that's easy, because there are a bunch of people building first homes who want to update their kitchens. Make the case that your microwave belongs in it due to the convenience it brings.

You're a futurist. What would that microwave look like in the future? Well, surely it would just be purchased, you'd put it in your home, and it'd have all sorts of features to make your life even more convenient.

These stories were written with the assumption that, at least in the West, that would continue forever. The Baby Boomers would have enough kids to justify the same sort of marketing strategy. And then those kids would have enough kids. And so on and so forth.

That didn't happen. The birthrate began to plummet in the 1970s and hasn't increased meaningfully since. There are fewer people naturally aging into your market, to say nothing of resources becoming more scarce as time goes on.

So what do you do if you are charged with providing shareholders ever-increasing returns on their investments by selling goods and services? Well, you try to extract more sales - or value - out of a smaller number of people. You don't just sell a smart home device; you require it to be tied to a subscription that must be paid monthly, and make the person using it buy a new one every so often to keep the revenue coming in. You could also collect the data on how they use the device and sell that to people looking to influence the purchase of further goods and services.

The microwave is now a "smart" device that will do all sorts of things... but you'll need to keep paying for it, over and over.

Same with music players, lighting fixtures, televisions, laundry machines, and everything else we've seen get the "smart home" treatment.

Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account that part. It was about the consumer, not the supplier, but the consumer can only be made to consume so much based on organic growth.

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