You’re driving in a rainstorm that’s been going all day and pass a house or business with its automatic sprinklers watering the lawn. So much for water conservation (a perennial topic of discussion during non-El Niño years in the arid desert climes of the Western U.S.).

No doubt, the building’s owner set the automatic sprinkler timer to start watering the lawn on a preset schedule, and the microcontroller in the sprinkler control unit obediently turned the sprinklers on—rain or shine. The owner is either too far away to change the device or the process of changing the program at the device is too complex.

Somewhere along the line, we started calling even the simplest electronic devices "intelligent." But if electronic devices are really intelligent, why do they water the lawn when it’s raining? These devices are only as smart as the information they’re given.

A truly intelligent device should accept dynamic information and make adjustments based on that information. It may even take forecast information and weigh decisions based on what is likely to happen in the future.

You might argue that this ability takes far too much capacity to build into simple devices like a sprinkler timer with an 8-bit microcontroller. But, adding a 32- or 64-bit micro would drive the price out of range for the consumer market. So "intelligent" devices continue to be unintelligent, and we run to the sprinkler controller whenever it rains.

But what if you could connect a simple device to dynamic information without adding resources to the device? A sprinkler controller that monitors environmental conditions or forecast information and changes its actions based on that information would save money and be politically correct. The device would be educated with updated information, making it truly intelligent.