Here's some free advice: Don’t try to break into Andy Rubin’s house. As soon as your car turns into the driveway at his sprawling pad in the Silicon Valley hills, a camera will snap a photo of your vehicle, run it through computer-vision software to extract the plate number, and file it into a database. Rubin’s system can be set to text him every time a certain car shows up or to let specific vehicles through the gate. Thirty-odd other cameras survey almost every corner of the property, and Rubin can pull them up in a web browser, watching the real-time grid like Lucius Fox surveying Gotham from the Batcave. If by some miracle you were to make it all the way to the front door, you’d never get past the retinal scanner.

Rubin doesn’t employ human security guards. He doesn’t think he needs them. The 54-year-old tech visionary (who, among other things, coinvented Android) is pretty sure he has the world’s smartest house. The homebrew security net is only the beginning: There’s also a heating and ventilating system that takes excess heat from various rooms and automatically routes it into cooler areas. He has a wireless music system, a Crestron custom-­install home automation system, and an automatic cleaner for his pool.

Getting the whole place up and running took Rubin a decade. And don’t even ask him what it cost. There’s an entire room full of things he bought, tried, and shelved, but the part that really drove him crazy was that it didn’t seem like automating his home ought to be this hard. Take the license-plate camera, for instance: Computer-vision software that can read a tag is readily available. Outdoor cameras are cheap and easy to find, as are infrared illuminators that let those cameras see in the dark. Self-opening gates are everywhere. All the pieces were available, but “they were all by different companies,” Rubin says. “And there was no UI. It’s not turnkey.”

At some point during his renovations, Rubin realized he was experiencing more than just rich-guy gadget problems. He was too far ahead of the curve. If anything, the problem is about to get much worse: The price and size of a Wi-Fi radio and microprocessor are both falling toward zero; wireless bandwidth is more plentiful and reliable; batteries last longer; sensors are more accurate; software is more reliable and more easily updated. As many as 200 billion new internet-connected devices are predicted to be online in just the next few years. Phones and tablets, certainly. But also light bulbs and doorknobs, shoes and sofa cushions, washing machines and showerheads.

In many cases, the effects of these connected devices will be invisible: better temperature optimization in warehouses or super-­efficient routes for UPS drivers. But at the same time, all those freshly awake devices will present an entirely new way to interact with the world around you. Imagine automating your morning routine for maximum efficiency and ease: At 6:15, your alarm goes off, the lights turn on, NPR starts purring, the bacon begins to sizzle, and your motorized closet whirs and presents you with today’s perfect outfit based on your schedule and the weather forecast. That’s the idea, anyway, and a mere daydream by current standards; most people’s smart homes don’t extend much further than turning on the lights with a smartphone app. But all the tech is out there to do much more. Somebody just has to make it work.

It’d be hard to find someone more qualified for the task than Rubin. He specializes in connecting people and things to the internet. As an engineer at General Magic, a company spun off in the ’90s from Apple to figure out the future of portable computers, he worked on some of the earliest mobile communicators. Later that decade, he built a box called WebTV that hooked your TV up to the internet. (OK, so his timing is not always perfect.) In the early aughts Rubin cofounded Danger and created the Hiptop, the proto-smartphone later known as the T-Mobile Sidekick. The Hiptop had a web browser, cloud storage, and an app store before any of those things were everywhere. And a few years later, of course, Rubin scored his biggest triumph yet. He founded Android, the open source mobile operating system he’d eventually sell to Google (for a reported $50 million) and help turn into the most successful software platform in the history of the world. Android now powers more than 2 billion phones, tablets, watches, cars, and televisions.