TETeMPOraL·Mar 11, 2021
I think Feynman's engineering team was right, mid-to-long-term. Playing was a good choice, because as they were finding their footing with new technology, they gained the necessary know-how to do calculations that would be infeasible to be done by hand - ultimately expanding both capabilities and efficiency. I bet you could trace parts of modern CFD all the way back to those engineers "playing with computers".
IoT doesn't offer that kind of growth, though. These are all tightly packaged appliances, their whole raison d'etre is to trick you into a subscription to a cloud service. Unless you're running custom software on DIY IoT connected to Home Assistant, or buying a custom deployment from an old-school home automation company, there's no space to grow here. You aren't going to make your home more ergonomic to use than you could with dumb
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switches, dumb thermostats, remotes and electric outlet timers. You'll just spend a lot of money and tweak a few trivial settings on an app to get something approximating your needs, and then have half of it stop working whenever your ISP drops your Internet connection for a few minutes; you'll have to replace appliances piece by piece as services backing them thank you for your incredible journey together, and eventually redo your setup/configuration with the next big cycle of upgrades.
So no, I think it's not playing like Feynman's engineers. It's playing like buying very expensive clothes and jewelry - it's paying for status, and has no lasting value beyond what you can make out of your temporary boost in status.
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EDIT: FWIW had my phase of smart lights controlled from a watch - in my case it was Hue lights hooked up to my Pebble. It was more streamlined than you could ever do with Apple Watch, by virtue of Pebble having actual buttons, and control going purely through LAN (Pebble -> Tasker on Android -> Hue Bridge -> Lightbulb). After a week of fun, I realized that most of the time, it's still the second least ergonomic option (the absolute worst was controlling from an app). What I settled on is a combination of dumb switches when on the move (usually faster to reach than even my watch), and a CLI script when near my computer[0].
Also this taught me that the most important component in IoT lights is... smart light switches. Which weren't cheap or easy to get those 6 years ago when I bought my Hue lights, so I had none. With dumb switches, whenever I used them - or my guests used them - they'd screw up the light setup and made bulbs inaccessible over network. I ended up putting a bit of Lisp code on Raspberry Pi, that monitored for lightbulbs that just reappeared on the network, and immediately reconfigured them to a desired state. It's a kind of workaround that you don't get to do if you just buy into neatly packaged, cloud-powered IoT appliances.
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[0] - https://github.com/TeMPOraL/hju