Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.

And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.

Yeah, and people sewed clothes per hand for hundreds of years until someone automated it with a machine.

You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.

And yet, progress marches forward and people want great efficiency and flexibility.