McCovey’s smart home is more than a celebrity's novelty item. It is part of a fast-growing industry: home automation.

Smart home technologies mean your heating comes on at the right time, you can manage your lights from a smartphone, and your dishwasher sends you text messages.

“Full control over one’s smart home is, at least in the present tense, an impossibility,” she said. “Part of that is because the whole purpose of a smart device is to give up control to someone or something — whether that is a device, a platform, its code. Users delegate work, thinking or management to smart devices.”

Smart home

Meaning

Noun