The most practical consequence here is time. A monitored smoke detector, a door sensor, a camera that pings your phone: these cut the gap between something going wrong and someone responding. That gap is where fires and break-ins actually do their damage. I'll grant my opponent's likely best point upfront, that connected devices add a hacking surface. But that's a handful of exploitable units weighed against a benefit that shows up in ordinary emergencies, and it's a risk you can cut with passwords and updates. The baseline isn't a fortress. It's a house that has no idea what's happening inside it.

The downed-internet problem has a mechanical fix: keep the physical key. Most smart locks ship with one precisely because manufacturers know connectivity fails. So the stranded scenario is a design flaw you can sidestep, not an inherent danger. And on hacking, the numbers matter. Millions of homes run these devices; headline breaches are rare and usually trace back to reused passwords, which is user-fixable. Meanwhile, the ordinary fire or medical emergency is guaranteed to happen eventually to someone. I'm weighing a low-probability, mitigable attack against a high-probability emergency that sensors measurably shorten. That trade still favors safety.

Imagine someone living alone who falls at night; a smart speaker or watch can call for help when no one else is there. That's the safety gain. My opponent's Mirai example is fair, and yes, insecure devices can be conscripted into botnets. But that was 2016, driven by default passwords, and it's a fixable network problem, not a reason to abandon the home benefit. A dumb house can't call 911. So I still weigh the guaranteed emergency against the mitigable, patchable attack.