About a dozen years ago I worked with a developer who built "smart house" applications. He was describing his home and how the house knew when he walked into a room and activated the lights. When he got into to bed, the lights in the room automatically went off. I asked him: "so, what do you do if you want to read in bed?" His reply was a quizzical look, and "?? The bed is for sleeping." He didn't understand how broken this mentality was.
The point is, if systems that anticipate your needs do not have adequate interface for working around them - and by adequate, I mean easily discoverable and intuitive, then they will be rejected by the majority of consumers. And with good reason. Technology should serve us, not require us to adapt to them.
Well that depends on how meta you are prepared to take it :)
The UI is in itself forcing you to adapt to it by asking you to input data into it.
Your refrigerator does not require you to turn on the light when you open it. Instead it turns on when you open the door.
I see this not as a revolution but as a slow (but exponentially faster) evolution. As issues gets ironed out you can remove more and more manual labour from the system.
You fail to address the point of how much control people are comfortable with giving away. Some lights are fine if they're fully automated (fridge). But for others people want to have some control (e.g., reading the bedroom, looking to see if there's a mosquito etc). So no, there appears to be a limit of how much UI you can take away.
I didn't disagree with your comment but pointed out that it doesn't address this "no UI" concept and whether people actually want that. While it is likely that in the future more things will be automated, it's not going to converge to people not controlling anything. I do believe systems will become better over time, just not necessarily through not having any interface.
Good example of a misidentified problem. That engineer identified the problem as the lights need to be on when somebody is in a room and off otherwise, and off when the person lies down.
But the real problem is that turning the lights on and off normally takes too much effort (for a #firstworldproblem at least). You have to walk over and flip a switch, interrupting whatever you doing.
A better solution would be design a system that lets people control the lights with minimal effort - a gesture, or a clap, or a voice command. So you can turn on the lights only when dark and not during the day, or when you want to read in bed, etc.
The point is, if systems that anticipate your needs do not have adequate interface for working around them - and by adequate, I mean easily discoverable and intuitive, then they will be rejected by the majority of consumers. And with good reason. Technology should serve us, not require us to adapt to them.