Sooner or later, all gadgets will converge into one
A couple of months ago I bought a utility jack. It lifts almost
anything I can slip its nose under. It also clamps and winches, and
that's all it does.
Down at the barn, I have a tool shop full of single-purpose tools -
pliers that can't be used as screwdrivers, logging chains that don't
double as chain saws. I admire the stolid singleness of that utility
jack - also that it needs no batteries, cannot be upgraded and won't
play MP3's.
It will become obsolete when gravity fails. But elsewhere there is a
different rule: everything that plugs in must converge. Once that wasn't
the case. In the American household circa 1960 , a telephone could not
also be a walkie-talkie or a television or a camera or a record player
or a radio or a photo album or an answering machine or an adding
machine.
All in one
It certainly couldn't be a Web browser, because there was no such
thing as the Web. Nor could it talk to the other electronic devices in
the house or pinpoint your exact location or send e-mail or record voice
notes or store addresses and phone numbers. And there was no chance that
it could be all of those things simultaneously, and make calls as well.
These days, of course, the newest cellphones combine all of these
functions.
That makes it sound as though the trend is to choose one particularly
handy, portable device - the cellphone - and steadily add more and more
features as memory increases and chips shrink. But it's more complicated
than that.
Every small electronic device is adding more and more features, which
is to say more and more of the same features. An iPod is striking for
being able to show movies. But so is a G.P.S. unit that transmits
driving instructions over an FM radio and uses entries in your address
book - uploaded from your cellphone via Bluetooth - to plot routes that
may vary depending on traffic conditions updated by satellite based on
real-time information from other drivers.
There is no meaningful reason why the remote control for your new
HDTV could not also place a phone call or tell your new washing machine
to skip the spin cycle. Or, somehow, vice versa.
Nor do I want to watch a download of "Scrubs" or "Pirates of the
Caribbean" or get my e-mail or balance my electronic checkbook on the
screen of the G.P.S. Not yet, at least.
But before long, there will be a single slim rectangular device in
which convergence is complete. What it is will depend on where it is and
what it's near. We will have no idea what to call it, because none of
its functions will have priority. Lose it, and you lose everything.
It's also the convergence of a significant part of our reality into
broad, intertwining strands of digitized data. That is an old prediction
for the computer age - the way everything dissolves into information -
but there is something new in watching so many different kinds of
information receivers become one.
(New York Times)
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