I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was as bad as you'd think

I was thinking the same thing :)

For those unfamiliar: http://blinkenlights.net/

A lot of consumer IoT feels forced. It feels like I am supposed to want these things. What am I? A luddite? It's The Future(tm)! Of course I should want a less reliable, more expensive, shorter life span, more complex security/privacy nightmare in place of a completely reliable long-lived inexpensive device.

Complexity is costly in many, many ways. There is zero justification for adding it to anything unless the payoff is some multiple of the complexity cost being added. I just don't see it here.

For any new tech, I always ask "what super power will this give me?" For much of IoT I can't answer that question. There are a few nice-to-haves but nothing compelling, no must-haves or genuine wows. Then you add in all the unbelievably creepy security and privacy implications and any lukewarm interest goes away. I can't shake the obviously crazy idea that some of this stuff is being pushed because certain people (advertisers, intelligence agencies) want as many sensors out there watching us as possible. Imagine every light switch, thermostat, etc. with an Internet connection and then think about the meta-data correlation capabilities with mobile sensor and location data and other Internet traffic.

We're really talking about a total surveillance society where literally every single thing you do is stored in a database somewhere. Anyone able to correlate your phone's approximate location and/or your web browsing history with, say, light switch data really will know every single time you use the bathroom and for exactly how long.

Do you stop moving and kneel every day at the correct time? Then you're praying to Mecca-- you're a Muslim. Do you leave the lights on late? That might say something about your personality profile. Do you work with the lights off? That says something else. Is there ambient sound but no light and are a male and a female present? They might be having sex. Two men in the bedroom? Gay sex! And that's just the easy low-hanging fruit I can imagine. Throw some theory-agnostic deep learning at it and I can imagine unbelievably spooky stuff that makes this look tame:

http://nypost.com/2013/10/29/facebook-knows-when-youre-going...

Edit:

But mostly I think the driver is tech industry wishful thinking. Everyone is looking for the next catapult capable of tossing unicorns to billion dollar valuations in 1-2 years.

Mobile has IMHO been a bit of a disappointment. It's been big but not quite as big as everyone predicted. It's failed to displace desktop or achieve "convergence," and the limitations of the UI and the walled garden model have kept "serious" apps off mobile platforms for the most part. The collapse of app stores as a commercial software sales platform with prices spiraling down to $0 and clutter making new apps un-discoverable has further destroyed any incentive to push the boundaries of the platform beyond a "portable dumb terminal."

It's also been an architectural disappointment. It was supposed to be a clean slate where we could escape some of the cruft and bloat of desktop, but we're doing iOS and Android around here and the development experience on both is as bad or worse than Windows, Linux/Qt/GTK, and the web. It's not the promised land by any stretch. We took a lot of bad ideas with us from desktop and then added walled gardens and more resource constraints. Woohoo!

So now everyone's hoping IoT will be the next unicorn flinger. I'm skeptical so far. The Blackberry and the iPhone had immediate killer apps: maps, portable chat/email, portable books, music, and movies, etc. Those are real benefits that are worth the cost and the downsides. They're "super powers." Where's the super power in an internet connected light switch?

Sure. I work in a large university building and can power up/down various systems from my desk for the same reason. But it doesn't require a full tablet computer in each room. These are simple network addressable devices on their own VLAN that allow me to (for example) create an interface that sends a string of commands like a remote control, provided I give proper auth. If you're a regular person in any of the rooms in the building, you can't easily gain access to the VLAN, much less connect to any of the networked controllers in the rooms.

As a result, I can shut things down from my office or set up schedules to do the same. I can monitor usage and save resources (lamp hours on projectors and lighting, etc)

The idea of using a full-on tablet computer is just silly and sounds more like something I'd do while tinkering at home and was looking for a use for some old phone or tablet sitting in a drawer. It's not something I'd put in any enterprise or commercial space.

How about a market for custom made Faraday cages? :)

I've seen those too. They're quite inconvenient because they actively prevent you from charging your phone or laptop while out of the room. They should leave some marked outlets enabled but usually they only do so for the mini-fridge. And of course "fancy" places build that into a cabinet.