I had a similar reaction to this...
"Talking at the Hot Chips conference, Papermaster said that surround computing imagines a world without keyboards or mice, where natural user interfaces based on voice and facial recognition redefine the PC experience, and where the cloud and clients collaborate to synthesise exabytes of image and natural language data. He said that the ultimate goal is to create devices that deliver intelligent, relevant, contextual insight and value that improves consumers’ everyday life in real time through a variety of futuristic applications."It creeps me out, as did a YouTube video someone recommended to me last year called "A Day Made of Glass...Made Possible by Corning"
While I certainly appreciate creativity, innovation and technical advances, I find both futures to be soulless. Both are missing the need for humans to physically interact with other humans.
The business model of Google, and all “web” industrial elements like it is - you are the commodity, not the client.
It is you who is being “sold” to those seeking to make themselves known to you, for their $$$ interest they want to sell to you.
Their means is - in the one-world-super-computer theme - to know every infintesimal bit and byte that is possible to know about you, so the Utopian sense of the all knowing world-wide super computer can be sure to “match you” only with what it knows is an interest of yours; cause it’s even smarter than you in knowing that.
There was a guy on TED some months ago, a well known tech guru.
He was explaining how for you or I or the next person there no longer is a “world wide web” - it’s not in our search results.
The data they think they know and the search algorithms already limit us to “your world wide web”, “my world wide web”, “his world wide web”, etc, etc., but not “the” world wide web.
And the cloud, and “surrround computing?
There is too much about you that is still not connected to the world wide super computer, and too many world wide clients you - the commodity - need to be sold to, or the business model of it all will not work.
That’s what the technology push about it is all about.
Technology itself has become another “ism” another Utopian “ism” just like Marxism, with the near same premise - eliminate the human as an individual, turn the human into a commodity where intelligennce far greaster than the human figures everything out for the human, takes care of not only supplying the human’s needs, but identifying them as well - that’s all that’s wrong with the world.