The image is from a Wired article on Self buttering toasters which may just be solving a more profound human problem than your toaster talking to your fridge.
Why the ‘Internet of Things’ may never happen – Computerworld.
Smart TVs, smart fridges, smart washing machines? Disaster waiting to happen | Ars Technica
Google, Apple and Microsoft race to bring software to cars
Great novels can change your life…and your brain
Great novels can change your life…and your brain – Telegraph.
The story is really a report on a so-called scientific study which sets out to report on something that was already known – that anything you do repetitively over a protracted period changes your brain. The thing about changing your life is just the attention grabber and has nothing to do with the study.
The frog in the pan
Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant | TechCrunch.
When I received my first invite to GMail I replied to my inviter with a sneery note thanking her but pointing out “they serve adverts with your email, you know!” The horror of a commercialised inbox back then outweighed the convenience of the storage on offer. “It was just a joke,” my inviter responded bashfully.
A year later I emailed another friend to ask for an invite. A free online mailbox suddenly had more value than the purity of my private offline mailbox.
Like the legend of the frog in the pan, it seems the incremental erosion of our privacy masks the transition from convenient, through comfort to the point of no return. It’s the small steps, the creep of acceptability that blinds us here. I wonder, however, if perhaps what we’re most blind to is not so much the loss of privacy, but rather the increasing rosy-eyed dependence on these technologies to run our lives. What else are we loosing of ourselves in this exchange?
By 2017 your smartphone might be smarter than you
It’s not how smart our smart technology is becoming, but how smart we are about how far to take this smart technology. Do we seriously want our phones to conduct our relationships with our family, friends, colleagues? I would, but I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.
