There's a meme that goes:

Person A: I'm a tech enthusiast! I have the latest smartphone, smartwatch, smart car, smart TV, smart home... all networked together and automated to make my daily life easier.

Person B: I work in tech. The last piece of tech I bought is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun nearby in case it starts acting funny.

Once you understand how the sausage is made and what the incentives are, you become very suspicious of every hot new tech integration that comes along.

But humans just don't write commercial software anymore. Don't expect to keep doing that for a living.

I will never understand some smart appliances.

Like...a smart TV so you don't need a second device to play your streaming services? I kinda understand, though I think it's a silly move. If my Fire TV stick gets deprecated, I can buy a new one for under $50. If my TV itself gets deprecated, I'm spending $1500+ for a new one. But like...the number of people who have their heads in the sand when it comes to pervasive ads being injected by their TV is appalling.

But why does anybody need a smart washer (either clothes or dishes)? I need to be physically there to load it. There's literally nothing to be gained by having an app. Sure, sometimes I want a delayed start for whatever reason, but literally every washer already has that function without an app.

I don't even see the purpose of WiFi-connected light bulbs. The only time I'm turning a light on or off is when I'm entering or leaving the room, in which case I'm passing by the light switch anyways.

My favorite response to this was a fellow dev who immediately replied “you let your printer near a GUN?!”

This has always been just a meme. Plenty of the people I know who know the most about tech are also very excited about it. Person B in this example is often miserable for a lot of other reasons that have nothing to do with tech, doesn't understand tech as deeply as the meme suggests, and pattern matches cynicism into everything.

Please don’t be sweepingly dismissive of people by framing like this. Printers lack mobility and firearms would only activate their defensive ink cloud reflexes, as every expert office IT worker knows (including you!). So the group B you’re describing is being portrayed as both excessively paranoid and blatantly incompetent in order to dismiss the views of tech experts that reject A.I. and support your own claim that they’re, to paraphrase your intent in last century’s terms, ‘dinosaurs’. That’s not a respectable form of rhetoric and your use of it paints both you and group A, the one whose beliefs you’re trying to promote, with a broad brush of skeptical disbelief.

HN is full of people who are far more on the “enthusiast” side than the cynical greybeard side.