Techological advances

You have a house, the house has many lights and you have several light switches in the wall to turn on/off the lights. The switches are mechanical assemblies, even not complicated have its cost. You need wires to conect the switches to the lamps, as you have many lamps and many switches you will need lot of meters of wires runing inside the wall and someone to make the electrical installation. All has its cost.

Today microprocessors are very cheap, you have for less than a dollar. You replace the mechanical electic switches by a piece of rubber or plate for touch button, put a microprocessor and send the on/off information by radio waves to the lamps that have a receiver and electronic swith in its sockets. You don't need to have lot of wires running inside the walls, you haven't to pay the wires. The switches or keypad are very much cheaper and the electrical installation becomes very simple, you need less people to make the work and need less qualified workers for the task, so you hire less people and pay them less.

As you use now a microprocessor, you have some processing power, so you can add timers, 20 programings and many things more for zero cost. If you want the light-pad, that once were switches, can calculate elliptic integrals. Other fabricant can offer Bessel functions, and all for a cost much less than the conventional and obsolete electrical installation.

 

Question: Is it a technological advance ?

 

Stupidity also evolves!