The beer comes to you

When the Web first came out in 1993, very few people could have predicted Google, Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia. The Web’s radically different means of distribution of information changed not only the answers to how we communicate, but the very questions.

Similarly, when the SmartPhone arrived in 2007, very few people could have predicted Lyft or Airbnb, Instagram or SnapChat. The SmartPhone changed digital usage patterns so radically, obsoleted so many long held assumptions about information scarcity, that the very economy itself was transformed.

Soon, when the wearables become ubiquitous in about four years from now, something analogous will transpire. But this change won’t just transform our information world — it will transform our physical world.

Once we have been freed from the tyranny of the screen, our digitally augmented interactions with that physical world will change radically. After we have stopped peering into display screens, we will once again focus our attention on our actual surroundings. The Internet of Things will have begun in earnest.

Pretty much everything around us will become robotically actuated, somewhat the way automobiles are already becoming robots. We will take it for granted that furniture will arrange itself at our bidding, that the lights and sound in our houses will adjust dynamically.

Our children will look back with amusement on those bygone days when their parents needed to leave the living room, go into the kitchen, and open a refrigerator door, just to have a beer — in that long ago time before unobtrusive robots carried such objects around for us.

After all, our children will be living in an age when such things are no longer even thought about. It will all seem so obvious to them: You don’t go to the beer — the beer comes to you.