We are rapidly heading into a world where it is getting easier and cheaper to automate things. I will provide an example. One day I got a notice from Google that my entire investment in their Nest architecture was going away. They made a decision to get out of this business after they bought it and started deprioritizing this whole Google Home initiative. Now, I know they are pretending to still do all of that, but seriously, it is really falling behind, and their abandonment of Nest really left a lot of us consumers hanging out to dry.
Well, of course, ADT was willing to come to the rescue. They could support these devices and all that, for only a small subscription fee. Well, come to find out, the subscription was not that small, and the device support limited, and the transferability really painful. So, in a fit of rage, I decided to build my own system. That was stupid.
I bought everything: locks, motion detectors, alarm stuff, keypads, door and window contacts, and a bunch of other items. I dove into Zigbee, Thread, and a hundred other protocols that I had never heard of. I started to try to get it all to work, running into one problem after the next. After I got it to work, I then had to constantly maintain and fix things that broke. I tried to make some home automation routines work, but other than my automatic Christmas light thing, I never got around to anything else. Instead, I just go in there and tweak things now and then. Most of my work is the maintenance of all the various components and all the compatibility issues.
Then, I fell off and ignored it. I had a Home Assistant implementation that worked, but would fall into disrepair, and I got busy, and so I never returned to it. I would just deal with it as it came up, and I dismissed any further automation due to the cost. Not necessarily the cost in money and time to set it up, but the economic life of the automation was just not worth it to me.
Two years later, I can now use AI to systematically help me resolve all of this. The price of automation dropped considerably, and the ability for me to build automations is significantly improved, and that makes the question of the automation needing renewal less of a burden.
We always think of automation as a traditional calculation:
Automation Payback = Upfront Automation Cost ÷ Monthly Manual Cost Avoided
However, as my example demonstrates, this is not why we elect to avoid the cost of an automation. The real reason is the missing concept of economic life. The question is…
Not:
“How much money will this automation save?”
But:
“How much money is this automation likely to save before something changes enough to make it obsolete?”
Staying power is the real factor here. AI has significantly dropped not only the cost of automation, but also the cost of renewing things when the automation has exceeded its staying power.
This is the idea behind “The Price Tag of Automation.” The counterintuitive argument would be:
We tend to compare the cost of automation against the cost of today’s manual labor. But the real comparison is between the accumulating cost of manual work and the depreciating value of automation.
One goes up with time. The other often goes down with time.
The investment decision sits at the intersection. And that leads to a very useful rule:
Don’t just calculate an automation’s payback period. Calculate whether its expected useful life comfortably exceeds its payback period.
To conclude my example, last night I was able to add some new lights, add them to Home Assistant, and then configure a routine that executed on motion, all in about 5 minutes. Then, I replaced a few components with new, upgraded ones, and the resetting of those three devices took less than 1 minute each. So, I am now much more likely to deploy future automations because the price tag for doing so significantly dropped.
