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The Future Of Smart Devices
It’s not going to be quite what you imagine…
We must begin by acknowledging a regrettable but empirically incontrovertible fact: for the average human the primary purpose of our 1.4kg brain is to act as ballast to stop the head from bobbing about when the person is waddling from fridge to toilet.
This is why automobile makers for the last fifty years have continuously invested in ever-more-ingenious systems to protect people from their own incompetence and abject folly. We now have safety cages, crumple zones, air bags, antilock brakes, automated braking systems, traction control, seatbelts with pretensioners, and headrests that act to reduce whiplash. We have safety glass, lane-keeping assistance, blind spot monitors, driver alertness monitors, and increasingly semi-autonomous driving capabilities. There is as much probability of an ordinary person learning to drive adequately (despite the common delusion that everyone is already “better than average”) as there is of an earthworm performing differential calculus.
And so the automobile industry shows us the direction in which smart devices must evolve in order to avoid a tsunami of lawsuits resulting from injury and death.
Today’s era-defining personal device is the smartphone. Personally, while I can admit the usefulness of being able to…
