When people end up widely adopting self-driving cars, it is possible that cars will become anonymous. Rather than being objects of status and privilege, automobiles might evolve into a more granular version of buses. When you need a car, one will show up, but it won’t matter which car, any more than you currently care (in most cases) which car you are getting into when you take a taxi or Uber.<\/p>\n
When the iPad first came out, I thought that would be the best way to think about it. Rather than being singular objects of status conscious owners, interactive tablets would be arguably be more useful if they were completely anonymous.<\/p>\n
In this scenario, when you pick up any iPad, its camera looks at your face, retrieves your data from the Cloud, and then becomes, as long as you are holding it, “your” iPad. And this would happen for any digital tablet you pick up, for just as long as you are using it.<\/p>\n
If you think of the growing data Cloud itself as the more “real” part of our shared digital ecosystem, then this makes perfect sense. After all, when you look out of any window in your house, you are looking into the same world outside. Reality itself doesn’t change based on which window you look out of.<\/p>\n
But this way of looking at things goes against Apple’s revenue model, which is based on selling their hardware as a highly marked up object of status and privilege. Yet there is nothing that inherently dictates such a relationship between user and machine. One day the market might drive both the car and the digital tablet in the same practical direction: to become an interchangeable window into our shared digitally enhanced world, freely interchangeable with any other such window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When people end up widely adopting self-driving cars, it is possible that cars will become anonymous. Rather than being objects of status and privilege, automobiles might evolve into a more granular version of buses. When you need a car, one will show up, but it won’t matter which car, any more than you currently care … Continue reading “Self-driving iPads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17076"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17077,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17076\/revisions\/17077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}