Chips with Everything.
In 2007 the computer gave up taking over the world. Instead the world
took over the computer.
By Bruce Sterling
2007: The word computer disappears from the Apple company, the founders
of the personal computing world. Instead Steve Jobs waxes lyrical about
his new iPhone: a mobile megamedia merger of phone plus camera, plus
Wi-Fi, plus Apple, plus Google, plus AT&T—and minus the “computer.”
Bill Gates has mysteriously forgotten “computers” too. His new
hobbyhorse? “An entirely new class of robots,” Gates states in
Scientific American, “that are essentially mobile, wireless peripheral
devices.” These aren’t your great-great-grandfather’s girl-shaped
1927-style robots from the film Metropolis. Gates’s visionary robots are
virtual-actual hybrid machines that wade around the world in pools of
wireless connectivity. Their brain is a PC hooked to the Internet.
Steve’s ultracapable iPhone, whose screen can be squinched with your
fingertips as if it were Play-Doh, bids fair to become Apple’s “remote
control for reality.” With the Web in your purse or pocket, applied to
physical reality via Google mapping services, you own the ultimate
Reality Distortion Field! For Gates, the computer is transforming itself
into Microsoft on wheels, a Zune that walks: with brand-new software
supporting Microsoft for Robots, a PC can ramble all over your house
photographing, scanning, listening, grabbing, and gripping—maybe even
fetching a beer! Where does Microsoft’s Wireless Robot want to go today?
more...
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2614
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