I think that's the definition of a "smart" appliance, and you just described what my problem with "smart" appliances is: they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little.
> they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little.
That's seems like the opposite of smart—instead, it's dumb yet intrusive. Or as Kurt Vonnegut said: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before." These devices do a lot of thinking, but have no wisdom.
They are smart, if you consider "smarts" to mean making lots of complex decisions. And they make good decisions a lot of the time too.
But you can't encode a set of heuristics that works every time into a physical device - that is the real problem with "smart". In a small minority of cases, the situation will get so complicated that the rules you embedded will produce suboptimal behaviour. To overcome that, you'd need to embed a human-like intelligence in the device.
Similarly will they fail for the minority of people who have drastically different goals (e.g. aesthetics) for the purpose of the device. Now you end up having to clone the owner wholesale.
Okay, really the problem with "smart" devices is that they typically don't disclose what rules they follow, and typically don't come to the user asking for help choosing when tradeoffs enter the picture (literally in the context of this article).
"Dumb" devices, meanwhile, lay all choices flat.
Granted, cameras have long stopped being comletely dumb - but they often make a good job opening themselves to doubt with things like optional manual color balance, and different priority modes.
I think that's the definition of a "smart" appliance, and you just described what my problem with "smart" appliances is: they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little.