Following up on yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking about what will happen when the physical and the virtual become ever more entwined. We won’t think of the objects around us as being either / or, but rather as both.
When that happens, there will be a seamless bidirectional interaction between the real and the virtual. We will still move the objects around us, but those objects will also move themselves.
We will come to think of the objects around us as the arms and legs of the software that runs our world. Chairs and tables will rearrange themselves for our convenience, lights and window shades will adjust themselves in subtle and useful ways, robots that we pay no attention to will pick up our groceries, organize our tables and bookshelves, clean and put away our dishes, and generally keep our lives in order.
That reality has already been coming for quite some time. We have robots all around us in the form of thermostats, air conditioners, pop-up toasters, elevators and doors that open for us when we walk into stores. And of course the automobile becomes an ever more sophisticated robot with every passing year.
So we shouldn’t be surprised to see this trend continue. Year after year, successive advances in machine learning continue to change our interaction with our physical world.
I suspect that as time goes on, some folks will end up feeling nostalgia for the “old ways”. But I, for one, will not miss putting away the dishes.