Smart home hubs — the automated aspects of your home, synchronized through your smart phone — are trending. You can wake up in the morning to music playing, coffee brewing and the thermostat already turned up. You can set your lights and heat to come on 15 minutes before you normally get home from work. The question the tech blogs are asking is which system is most comprehensive and glitch-free. The question no one is asking is whether or not this technology is a good thing in the first place.

Maybe no one is asking this question because the answer seems so obvious. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to a warm house, brewed coffee and wireless speakers playing that famous Bach cello prelude? What harm could there possibly be in this? These devices promise increased convenience and increased efficiency — greater comfort and freedom from mundane tasks to do what really matters. If we have the power to increase convenience and efficiency, why wouldn’t we use it? These are thoroughly engrained American values.

Smart home hubs are not inherently evil. They may be very helpful. Convenience, in moderation, is a good thing. I do have a problem, however, with the uncritical acceptance of technology, with the lack of dialogue about the costs of the technologies we so readily accept. We hear of the benefits, but every innovation is a compromise of something else. We need to weigh the costs against the benefits, and if the cost is too high, to forego convenience and efficiency for the sake of our humanity.

What is the cost of smart home hubs? First, they remove physical human labor from a number of tasks. Instead of getting up and making the coffee yourself, a machine does it for you. It becomes a middleman between you and reality. Thus the human body becomes increasingly involved only in consumption and not production; and the body becomes little more than a vehicle for the mind. As Wendell Berry writes in “The Unsettling of America,” “Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless…because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few other employable muscles back and forth to work.” Smart home hubs only encourage this trend.

Second, this technology also interrupts human interaction. It means you aren’t making the coffee for your roommate. Instead of getting up and turning up the heat for the others in the home to wake up to — or stoking the fire in the woodstove — the smart home hub has the heat already turned up for you. This costs us things like Robert Hayden expressed in his poem “Those Winter Sundays”: “Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,/then with cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. / … What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Relegate the heat to a slick, automatic machine, and this sentiment is lost.

Finally, technology limits little inconveniences. But no technology can limit big inconveniences, and so, when these big inconveniences come, we increasingly don’t have any established way to deal with them. We need to encounter little inconveniences in order to be steady, self-controlled, self-sacrificial people. The small habitual inconveniences, the small habitual layers of self-sacrifice, prepare us for the inevitable larger ones.

These are not costs we often consider, because they are difficult to quantify. But they are very real, and far too much to pay for the sake of a little increased convenience. We cannot afford to overlook these questions, or take an uncritical approach to new technologies.