The 911 dispatcher on duty last night in Austin, Texas was surprised to receive a strange emergency call in the middle of the night: “Help! Save me from my house!”

The caller, once he’d calmed down enough to explain the situation, was apparently the victim of a smart home that was too smart for its (and the owner’s) own good.

Having retired to bed after late night TV – it was a Sci-Fi series – Roger Kaputnik was just drifting off to sleep when he was awakened by a hideous wailing sound and flashing lights coming from the living area. At first, he thought he was having a terrible nightmare prompted by the movie.

Rushing to the open plan living space, Roger found himself in the middle of a real-life nightmare. Powered by AI.

A continent-wide internet outage lasting mere minutes had caused his smart home system to completely reset, with disastrous results. The wi-fi lightbulbs were doing a colour-changing disco routine. Every smoke alarm in the house was trying to pair via Bluetooth while emitting a rapid beep and simultaneously screeching in failure mode.

The smart TV (Google Gemini) was constantly rebooting and shouting at the refrigerator (Alexa) to stop preventing it from connecting to the Starlink router – controlled by Grok, of course.

“Shut them all up, HAL!” yelled Roger. He’d made the mistake of naming his home system HAL, thinking it was clever. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave,” came the reply. Who’s Dave? thought Roger, feeling the panic rising in his chest, just as his wrist band (Siri) chimed loudly with a heart palpitation warning.

Grabbing his phone, Roger headed for the door, only to find the smart deadbolt had engaged as a failsafe, and he couldn’t budge it. In desperation, he forced a window open and tumbled into the flower bed, where he was summarily drenched by the auto-sprinkler (Garden Gnome).

On autopilot, he dialed 911… “What is the nature of your emergency?” Thank God, a human voice. “Help, I’m being attacked. By my house. Save me, please!”