This is Joe Pemberton's photo from today's Future Tense. The article was about the internet of things. Anthony Funnell's introduction went like this -"Imagine your toaster has an inbuilt computer and it can speak to your fridge. Now imagine your fridge talking to the computer at your local shopping centre. All without your involvement. More and more everyday objects are becoming internet connected. So are we about to witness a new phase for the internet? An internet where objects, not people, communicate: 'an internet of things'"
The idea is that you can put intelligent microchips into everything now, including people, and this means that if those chips are wirelessly connected to the internet then you can track them wherever they go. Interesting, but scary in a way. It solves the problem of stolen goods because they can never disappear, so that's a good thing, but I'd be interested to know what life would be like with everything sending out "I'm here! I'm here!" signals to everything else.
Perhaps convergence is a good thing to a certain point only. I guess we'll see when it starts to happen, then we can decide whether we like it or not.
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