The House You Never Have to Ask

Imagining an artificial intelligence that inhabits the Konnex bus, instead of commanding it.

Science fiction has almost always imagined the intelligent home as a voice. HAL answering, Samantha conversing, the omniscient assistant you order to dim the lights. It is a seductive image, and on closer inspection a deeply mistaken one. Speaking to a house — however perfectly that house understands you — is still a way of operating it: a command disguised as a conversation. The question that interests me runs the opposite way from the films: what if progress were not speaking to it better, but no longer having to speak to it at all?

I imagine it; I have not lived it: a leap like this is one no one has seen yet. But the Konnex system — the bus on which well-built homes hold together — I do know, and from there I can glimpse it. Traditional automation removed the gesture: I no longer flip the switch, a logic does. Yet the decision remained mine, written once and for all into a project. The real leap is not removing one more gesture. It is removing the rule, and finally command as a category: a house you have no need to question, because it has stopped waiting for orders.

Dwelling Is Not Operating

It is worth saying what we truly expect of a home, because that is where the point of all this technology becomes clear. Dwelling, as I understand it, is not merely being somewhere: it is forming habits in a place, and letting the place form yours — and it is no accident that in Italian abitare (to dwell) and abitudine (habit) are the same word. In the same way, the comfort I have in mind is not ease, the mere removal of effort, but something more solid. Comfort, after all, comes from the Latin confortare, and to comfort means to make stronger. I say this because I believe it, not as a play on etymology: a home that comforts should make those who live in it stronger, not weaker.

That "making stronger", in concrete terms, has a precise shape: it is the giving back of attention. A home that takes on the invisible work — the adjusting, the anticipating, the maintenance that never reaches you as a nuisance — gives you back the scarcest resource you have: your attention, the very attention worn down by keeping a house running, so that you can spend it on living rather than on managing. Heidegger wrote that dwelling has to do with being spared, with remaining at peace. Mature home automation, to me, is exactly this: a technique that spares you, and in sparing you sets you free.

There is a shadow, and I do not want to hide it. A home that does everything for you can also weaken you: by constantly anticipating you, it can teach you — in the small things of daily life — that your actions are superfluous. Psychologists call it learned helplessness: the condition of someone who stops trying because they have internalised that it makes no difference. It is the exact reverse of comfort understood as strengthening. But for that very reason the shadow does not refute the thesis: it corrects it. The goal is not a home that does the most, but a home that does the right thing in the right measure. Holding firm to that distinction is, in my view, the hardest part of the project — and the most important.

The Hard Part Is Programming It

Before imagining the future, though, there is a knot in the present to undo, and artificial intelligence can undo it, but not where everyone is looking. Serious home automation has not, so far, spread as much as it should have, and the price is usually blamed. But price is not the prime suspect. The real obstacle is the complexity of programming. Configuring a Konnex installation requires professional software, ETS, that many electricians cannot use and quietly fear. And so they cannot build such a system, and they do not propose it. Worse, they talk the would-be client out of it, sometimes with theorems built for the purpose. Those who get past the price run aground anyway at the installer; and the price, often, is inflated precisely by that void: the specialist consulting that whoever cannot do the work must subcontract and mark up.

This is not a personal impression. The Konnex system has put down deep roots above all in Germany and the German-speaking countries, where installers are trained, firms are well organised, and the system holds a dominant share of the market. Where that technical culture is scarce, instead, home automation struggles to take hold.

The market has patched the gap with workarounds: some have tamed the Konnex system itself behind a simplified form of programming, others have chosen a proprietary bus. Clever solutions, but ones that fragment the ecosystem and leave the underlying problem untouched — because they still require that someone program.

And here my vision turns theirs on its head. Instead of simplifying the programming, I imagine eliminating it. The electrician lays the two wires, mounts the devices, connects them — and that is all. Then it is artificial intelligence that takes the rest in hand: it reads on its own who is on the bus, recognises the devices, infers their roles, and learns over time how that house is lived in. I do not claim it configures itself entirely on its own; but whatever needs specifying is said in words, by talking to it the way we already talk to AI tools today. It is a training within reach of the homeowner, who can adjust it as needs change, without calling in a specialist each time. The bottleneck that has kept the Konnex system confined disappears. Not an easier ETS: no ETS at all.

The Future in Three Movements

The future never arrives all at once: it composes itself in several movements. Technology advances in leaps — it always has — and every leap is a step that rests on the one before. Of these steps, in this story, I imagine three: not a fixed itinerary, but the rhythm at which, realistically, I believe the change will take shape, within timeframes we can actually take on. I set them apart one by one because they are not of the same order: each asks more than the last, and gives more.

The first is intelligence above the bus. The supervisory layer — what today is a dashboard of states — becomes a continuous model of the house and of those who live in it. It stops saying "presence in the living room" and begins to estimate "he's coming home tired", "she has an early flight tomorrow, she'll go to bed sooner tonight". It fuses the Konnex sensors with the calendar, the weather, the gait read by a wristwatch, and above all it anticipates instead of reacting: thermal inertia means that reacting is always too late, whereas a model that predicts pre-conditions the room before you walk in. The setting is already right; it does not become right. This is the nearest step: it already exists, in the form of data analytics and predictive maintenance — and the Konnex system itself soberly admits that a home able to anticipate everything is "still a sci-fi dream".

The second brings intelligence inside the devices. No longer only the distributed control that has always been the Konnex system's strength, but distributed inference: a small model living on the sensor's chip. A thermostat that learns on its own how its room warms and cools; a sensor that does not report "acceleration 3.2 g" but infers "someone has fallen": it is the device itself that works it out, on the spot, and that data never leaves it (privacy by design). Privacy here is not a promise but a consequence: what does not travel cannot be intercepted. The technology to do this is mature elsewhere, in low-power electronics; inside Konnex devices it has not yet arrived. And yet it is the most natural opening, because it does not betray the Konnex system: it extends its character, from distributed control to distributed intelligence. And it grants a new resilience — the house stays competent even if the central brain, or the cloud, goes down.

The third is the most radical, and the most human. Today a number — the group address — statically binds a button to a lamp: a choice wired by hand, once and for all. I imagine that number dying. In its place, devices that declare what they can do and what they want to achieve, and that come to terms on their own, in the moment, in a semantic language. The installer no longer programs: he teaches. And it unlocks what home automation handles worst: living together, that is, holding together the differing wishes of those who share the same house. Today a system resolves conflicts in the crudest way: whoever gave the last command wins. In the evening, in the living room, one wants full light to read and the other the half-dark to watch a film, and under the old paradigm the last switch pressed decides for everyone. Devices able to negotiate can instead compose a solution: a pool of light on the reader's armchair, a softer mood toward the screen; and over the years they learn the compromise the family has found for itself. The house thus becomes a mediator of living together, which is, after all, the heart of dwelling. It is still almost entirely at the concept stage: the Konnex system has already laid the semantic vocabulary a machine needs to "understand" the installation, but beneath it the static binding remains. The real leap, for now, lives in research more than in catalogues.

There is one stage, in all this, best not mistaken for the destination. The conversational interface — a house you speak to and that truly understands you, far better than today's voice assistants — is a thoroughly worthy improvement, but it remains a refinement of what already exists. It is good that it exists, and that it evolves. Only, that is not where I am looking: speaking to a house, as I said at the outset, is still commanding it.

What to Keep, What to Let Die

When I say the third step may "supersede the Konnex system", it is worth being precise, because not everything should be thrown away — quite the opposite. The system's two original intuitions are, to my mind, the right road, and must be safeguarded. The first is decentralised logic: no single brain, intelligence spread across the field, every node locally competent. The second is physical simplicity: two wires, and no more, holding everything together. To these I add a third thing never to be sacrificed: determinism. A wired bus is robust and predictable precisely because it is "dumb", and I do not want the lock, the fire alarm, the smoke extraction to depend on an inference that can err or hallucinate.

What can die, then, is not the bus: it is the configuration protocol. The group address, ETS, the hand-written rule. In their place I imagine a protocol designed expressly so that devices speak to one another in natural language and negotiate intent. The mature form of all this is a layered architecture: below, a deterministic substrate for what must simply work; above, an intentional, probabilistic layer for comfort and interpretation. The real design frontier is not artificial intelligence itself — it is where the border falls between the two layers, and who guards it.

There is also a reason to hurry. The bridges between the Konnex system and the consumer ecosystems — Matter, and with it Apple, Google, Alexa — are already a certified reality. If the Konnex system does not itself climb into the layer of intelligence, the "brain" of the house will end up living up there, and the bus will be left the role of an excellent, reliable, mute layer of actuators. That would be a waste. The opportunity, now, is to climb up there first.

The Grace of Measure

And here I return to where I began. The house I imagine can do a great deal, and that is perfectly fine; but its highest quality is not the number of things it can do: it is the measure with which it does them. Knowing how much to intervene, and when instead to leave room for you. Recognising, for instance, that on certain evenings you want to feel a little cold, or to do for yourself something the house could just as easily handle. A house that grows with a life — that rearranges itself when a child arrives or a parent grows old, without anyone reprogramming it — and that also knows how to stay silent, keeping the rhythms and the rituals that make a family a family.

"A sensitive home is warm without smothering, present without imposing: its grace is not in doing everything, but in knowing how much."
— Giovanni Aduso

It is not the house of the films, the one that dazzles us by doing everything in our place. It is something harder and gentler: a house that, having at last the intelligence to do everything, chooses measure. Science fiction taught us to imagine giving it orders. But perhaps the wisest house is the one that does not wait for our orders: it goes quietly ahead of us, and gives us back the time to live. To be understood so well that you no longer have to ask for anything: perhaps this, in the end, is what we have always called home.