One of the things you always, and I mean always, hear about Internet of Things and smart home devices is that they “just work.” They’re all like these magic autonomous robots that’ll connect themselves to your wifi, then go do their thing, yet also be totally unobtrusive and intuitive (whatever those two words mean). Sounds cool, right?

Of course, the reality is very different, as this essay from IoS explains. The light went on sometime around the point when the author’s Internet-enabled thermostat stopped working whenever the wifi connection was lost (and “The only way to control the gadget is via the app, so when it breaks you’re really screwed”), and it came time to update their Philips Hue light bulbs: “When the first firmware update rolled around, it was exciting, until I spent an hour trying to update lightbulbs. Nobody warned me that being an adult would mean wasting my waking hours updating Linux on a set of lightbulbs, rebooting them until they’d take the latest firmware. The future is great.”

In other words, things work great until they don’t, at which point all the wheels come off. Further, as we’ve learned recently, connected devices are “connected” to the fates of their companies, in a way that “dumb” devices are not. If the company that made your hammer or pants goes belly-up, that doesn’t affect your ability to pound nails or cover up your naughty bits. But that’s not the case with smart home devices.

A one-time purchase of a smart device isn’t a sustainable plan for companies that need to run servers to support those devices. Not only are you buying into a smart device that might not turn out to be as smart as you thought, it’s possible it’ll just stop working in two years or so when the company goes under or gets acquired.

The Internet of Things right now is a mess. It’s being built by scrappy startups with delusions of grandeur, but no backup plan for when connectivity fails, or consideration for if their business models reach out more than a year or two — leaving you and me at risk.

Just another indicator of how technologies of the future could turn out to be really distracting.