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When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone
The Atlantic is running an article about how "smart" devices are starting to see everyday use in many people's home. The authors say this will fundamentally change the concept of what it means to own and control your possessions. Using smartphones as an example, they extrapolate this out to a future where many household items are dependent on software. Quoting:
These phones come with all kinds of restrictions on their possible physical capabilities. You may not take them apart. Depending on the plan, not all software can be downloaded onto them, not every device can be tethered to them, and not every cell phone network can be tapped. "Owning" a phone is much more complex than owning a plunger. And if the big tech players building the wearable future, the Internet of things, self-driving cars, and anything else that links physical stuff to the network get their way, our relationship to ownership is about to undergo a wild transformation.
They also suggest that planned obsolescence will become much more common. For example, take watches: a quality dumbwatch can last decades, but a smartwatch will be obsolete in a few years.
What kind of phone does he own?
You can now own a fridge for only $40 / months (on a 2-year plan with select providers)
Your stove has no more credit left. Do you want to purchase a $2.99 "Heat Pack" to continue cooking?
Get a free car! Want to drive? $19.99 in-app purchase for 100 miles. Want to unlock door? $0.99 for a 10-pack. Or $9.99 for a mega-pack with AC.
Industry commodity standard playback on computer, car audio systems, home audio systems, and portable players, a usable lifetime of at least 15 years (in my experience), and the price is now right (for the older music I listen to, many titles are available for under $10).
I wish they would get rid of that security tape on the shrink wrap though. Has there been a problem with shoplifting them since around 2007, when all the big box stores closed within a couple years of one another?
Do you want a crockpot that has to be replaced at every few years—or at least that will be forever upgrading itself? Would apps change your mind?
When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well. The market does not provide what people want -- it provides what is profitable.
AHHHHHHHHHHhhhahahahaha
Wow, a plunger. More complex than owning a plunger. And, apparently he can download whatever he wants on his plunger and can take it apart and put it on whatever carrier he wants. Wow! What a comparison! If we follow along, we find that his plunger only works on toilets with indoor plumbing and not on porta-potties. It also only works on the standard design; there are other designs where he needs a different plunger. Oh, and the manufacturer will provide NO SUPPORT if he takes the plunger apart. Worse, the plunger doesn't have a replaceable battery! Oh noes!
These phones come with all kinds of restrictions on their possible physical capabilities. You may not take them apart. Depending on the plan, not all software can be downloaded onto them,
You mean, just like basically every electric appliance ever made for the past, what?, 40 years?
My washing machine, fridge, rice cooker, air conditioner, TV, HiFi, radio, electronic alarm clock, etc, ALL comes with "all kinds of restrictions on their possible physical capabilities" and I can't take them apart without voiding their warranty. Most of them have logic circuits, or even CPU, running inside, which I have no way to download ANY software into them.
I have no way of knowing if I am able to utilize EVERY bit of their physical capabilities. Can I, say, tell my rice cooker to heat up beyond its preset safety limit? I would think its heating element should be capable of reaching temperatures way more than cooker normally allows it to before shutting it off. Hey, that's a "restrictions on its possible physical capabilities"! Can I download software into my of PAL TV so it can accept NTSC signal? Can I change the software of my electronic alarm clock to do more?
Gee, so now instead of every lazy journalist just rerunning old stories by add "... on the Internet!", now they rerun old stories by add "... on the smartphone!"?
Oliver.
Everything working OK, only the 'phone' part sucking?
No thanks.
A perfect example of why connectivity should be controlled by the PUC (and considered a public utility). I don't want providers shoving locked, altered OS's with applications they deem necessary or recommended. I don't want to be told what type of device I can use to access bandwidth running RFC spec communication protocols. I don't want your DNS servers shoved down my throat, providing compensated landing pages in lieu of the address I requested. I don't want them believing they have a right to profit off of any data I care to view.
Venturing even further, you can take your POTS system
separation from my bandwidth and the double income you have been earning for the past 15 years and put it where the sun doesn't shine.
I feel better now..
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The authors say this will fundamentally change the concept of what it means to own and control your possessions.
So the authors are considering a future where we have to replace all our domestic appliances every 2 years, simply because someone somewhere has decided that the control software *must* have this new feature (that nobody asked for) and that it will only run on version X. You now have 3 months to toss the old fridge / cooker / vacuum cleaner / lightbulb before it gets automatically bricked. Even though it performs its primary function perfectly.
No thank you.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Since fucking when?
There is nothing stopping me taking my phone apart. Will the phone police come get me?
Very true. I have a cheap Casio watch that I've had since the 1980s. The band long-ago broke, but I replaced it with a belt-loop hook. I can only recall changing the battery twice. It runs a tiny bit fast (several seconds a month), but until it completely dies, I see no reason to replace it for telling time at a glance (something that can't be done with a smartphone). Plus, if I lose it, I don't care (I've gotten more than my money's worth out of it) and nobody wants to steal it.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
This moves are stupid beyond belief. I want my refrigerator to keep things cold and my stove to make them hot. Add an Internet of Things to them or run them from a smartphone and the chance that they'f fail in their basic tasks grows enormously. The benefits aren't worth the hassle.
If I really need to connect my toaster to the internet then I deserve to buy a new one every 2 years.
Yeah, they do, just like you do except maybe even more.
Big business keeps them informed through massive lobbying and super PACs. They know more about it than you do.
Politicians don't need to know how to make money from technology. They need to know how to get votes from technology.
Germany?
Scroll down to the section, "Targets."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
My cell phone frequently freezes, reboots itself, several app crashes daily. Wi-Fi drops. Android is a piece of shit. I do not want my appliances behaving this way.
Comparing a phone to a plunger is silly, and makes me question the cognitive abilities of the person making the analogy.
Everything is a trade off. My car is so complex I can't begin to figure out how to fix it, but I do have a diagnostic tool on my iPad that I could not possible afford 10 years ago. My watch, and iPod Mini, is obsolete but it still tells me the time. As long as that is all I want it do it is fine. I used my 3GS over the summer as a roaming phone. Slip a sim card in it and I was good to go. As long as I wanted it as a phone, I was good to go.
Yes, you can't take stuff apart. OTOH I was one of the few people I knew that actually soldered computers to repair them, rather than just plug and play with a new board. Yes, some phones are not upgradable to current software, but many consumers seen to happy to make that choice to have a cheaper phone or a phone with other features. I can even see the current situation where you pay per page for ink is an option that many people would prefer.
Certainly there is a loss when we do not have a choice, but I think in many cases we still have a choice, it is just that we do not want to pay the real or opportunity costs for that choice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Just as Digital Restrictions Management and various schemes for 'protecting' 'intellectual property' have not been unqualified successes, this trend also will be undercut, to some extent, by people who hack, make, reverse engineer, re-purpose, and repair hardware, firmware, and software. It just remains to be seen how the legislative and enforcement aspects play out. And that depends largely on Joe and Jane Average's opposition to A) basically renting or leasing most of the stuff in their lives, and B) paying to be spied upon, advertised to, and held hostage by corporate interests.
If even a large minority of citizens refuse to put up with this crap and instead have old stuff fixed and new stuff modified or boutique-built, then it will be hard for governments to justify what will otherwise be a very heavy hand in favour of laws enforcing corporate control. I'm not optimistic that people who have been lulled into thinking there is no alternative, (or that planned obsolescence and corporate nosiness are somehow right and inevitable), will do anything other than cave and roll over. But there is some hope.
I volunteer as a fixer for an organisation called Repair Cafe - we run events wherein once a month people bring items in to be fixed for free. Not just computers, printers, phones, earbuds, and the like, but also household appliances, clothing, books, etc. Many of these people aren't bringing things in because they can't afford replacements; rather, they recognize the quality is better in their older items, and they hate the wasteful and controlling aspects of planned obsolescence. So we may yet see large numbers of average citizens who reject the dystopian plans of those who call their greed-driven view of the future 'Utopia'.
In the category of 'not likely', but still worth considering, is the possibility of simplifying our lives. All of these technological innovations are cool, and they drive our economies, and some of them are significant. But really, how many new shinies contribute to our fundamental sense of worth, fulfillment, happiness, and meaning? I would argue that they tend to undermine those values - and many sociologists and psychologists would agree with me. It's probably too late to try stuffing that genie back in the bottle though...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Notice that most people wear a surveillance device (known in newspeak as "cellphone" or "smartphone") and you don't.
Don't you want to be liked? Don't you want to blend in? Don't you want to be normal? Don't you want to join in reindeer games?
You already have access to /. and you are spying my post.
Maybe you should cut that out.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Richard Stallman is playing the world's tiniest violin somewhere right now.
Sounds to me more like your 'things' own you, instead of you owning them -- or should I look at it as corporations owning us?
To be blunt about it: Fuck that shit. It's already bad enough that for too many people, their 'phone' is more like a 'lifestyle' instead of just being a communications tool; is it serving them, or are they serving it? Will so-called self-driving cars (something else I have less than zero interest in having anything to do with) be a tool for us to use? Or will it be just another way to control us? When every goddamned thing in your house, right down to your lightbulbs and your toilet, are connected to the Internet, is it really your home anymore, or is it a prison, and all these things are just there to facilitate the monitoring of you by corporations and governments? For fuck's sake, you can't even ride your bike somewhere anymore without some corporation trying to convince you that you should take a GPS tracker with you, and voluntarily upload the tracking data to them (Strava).
No thanks. I don't live to serve things, it's the other way around.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No thanks. Even the basic functionality of what a 'phone' should do has decreased in quality. Greatly
We've gone from "So clear you can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?!?"
This sounds like what Ted Kaczynski thought things might come to. I don't agree with his methods, but it looks like some of the things he ranted about might be the way things are going.
My hand-built mechanical watch may be less than 100% accurate, provide only basic functions and may indeed only last decades.
It's also far from dumb. It's intricate, complex and beautiful.
We can fix that. In your hearts you all know how. The simplest solutions are always the best.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In my opinion, there is no reason why a crockpot that also has an app interface or a smart interface cannot run for decades (short of the built-in MBTF of the electronics). After all, some basic standalone functionality has to be provided. Granted, it might be harder to find the apps to run it 10 years down the line, but that doesn't mean that it will stop working.
Like anything else, if it is a popular model, the apps will be archived on the internet. As an example, most manufacturers keep drivers for discontinued products online and sites like Driver Guide fill a niche for old drivers (for example, they have NE2000 ISA drivers listed). I can't help but believe that we will see similar sites for archived apps. I'm willing to bet, though, that only the Android apps will be archived in this manner due to the closed nature of the Apple ecosystem.
As for smart watches.. They will have basic functionality out of the box (i.e. be able to tell time). If the app is lost, does the watch stop working? No. It might be worth less, but that doesn't stop it from being a watch.
I want to be able to ask my refrigerator what's inside it while I'm walking down the isle in the store. It would be convenient to have the stove text me when it's preheated. Or to be able to start it preheating while I'm driving home after I picked up a frozen pizza because my refrigerator reminded me I don't have any food in it. If you were in charge, we wouldn't have skyscrapers. When you add more than three stories, the chance that a building will fail at it's basic task grows enormously. The benefits aren't worth the hassle, right? Easier to just sit on the couch and watch reality TV.
Then you will truly be little brother.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Needs not be slow - you just need enough land and fast-growing trees.
That gets a tad difficult when you are trying to grow enough trees for 7 billion people.
Furthermore wood burning stoves are rather dirty from an environmental standpoint. Most traditional wood burning stoves are quite inefficient and release a lot of particulate matter.
Until you've completely paid for it, you don't own it. Don't like that? Then buy the phone outright. Then you're free to unlock it
That works in countries where all carriers use GSM/UMTS. But in North America, how do you use a phone that you bought outright if you happen to live where Verizon has a good signal and T-Mobile doesn't? Verizon and Sprint use CDMA2000 and won't activate service on any phone not purchased from them.
It runs a tiny bit fast (several seconds a month), but until it completely dies, I see no reason to replace it for telling time at a glance (something that can't be done with a smartphone).
Which is exactly why those devices remain useful. And there are times when that is valuable. I sometimes carry a (dumb) watch when I'm hiking or doing some competitive distance running. Also useful if you are flying a plane or navigating a boat.
Here's the thing though. How often to you *really* need to know the time at a glance and do not have several clocks within eye shot these days? I spend most of my day working near a computer that has the time right on the menu bars. My car has a clock. I have various clocks in most of the rooms of my home. Most places at my office have at least one clock visible. When would I truly need to know the time so quickly that I cannot take a few seconds to pull my phone out of my pocket. Why would I wear a relatively uncomfortable piece of jewelry with no other purpose just so I can know to the second what time it is throughout the day? Does that really make sense?
A good hammer, a good manual drill, a good screwdriver, will last a lifetime.
And will sit in a drawer for any but the most basic or simple of tasks. I have each of those tools and use them but 9 times out of 10 I find myself reaching for the cordless hammer-drill or the pneumatic nail gun because I value my time and don't believe in pointless effort. Plus a good part of the reason those hand tools last is because you are somewhat limited in the amount of work you can do with them. I can generate FAR more torque with my hammer-drill than with any manual screwdriver or hand drill. Pretty useful when trying to punch a hole in concrete or loosen a stuck bolt.
Many people, however, invest in pneumatic hammers, electric drills, and bit sets even though they know it will break.
Because they are FAR more productive with those tools. Maybe you've never done any construction. I have. Try framing a house sometime with a traditional hammer and traditional saw and miter box and then do it with a nail gun and circular miter saw. Then get back to me on how much I should value that old school hammer. Sure you can get the job done with the old tools and people did it for a long time. And it will take you 20X longer and require far more effort.
My cast iron frying pan has worked for nearly a century and will likely last several more centuries without any upgrades, fees, etc.
Personally I'm not all that interested in having a microprocessor in every device. Most things don't need them. However, virtually everything I own I can take apart, fix, hack and rebuild - yes, even "Smart" devices.
The original poster's comments say more about them than they do about technology. There have always been people who didn't know how to do more than turn the switch to get light.
It's also far from dumb. It's intricate, complex and beautiful.
I think no sane person would argue that a good mechanical watch isn't beautiful as well as an amazing piece of engineering. (I cannot say the same for crappy digital watches however) That doesn't change the fact though that they are a single purpose device that generally speaking is seldom necessary these days. I don't really need to carry around an extra gadget whose sole purpose is to tell me the time 99.99999% of the time. There are occasions when that is useful/necessary but they are rare these days.
If you enjoy wearing a watch there is no problem with that. Just recognize that you are wearing a piece of functional jewelry rather than making a practical choice. I think a watch of any sort is a much better choice than wearing polished rocks embedded in rare metals.
I am seeing serious addiction of young females to smart phones. Crippiling, life absorbing, non stop use of smart phones is becomming all too common. From what I can see commitment to a mental health facility might actually be required for some young women to break the addiction. They are creating a virtual life of sorts and avoiding all aspects of normal life andin some cases not leaving a bedroom for days or weeks at a time. I've never seen anything like it.
Here's a purely hypothetical conversation people could have with their phone:
You: Hello, iPhone. Do you read me, iPhone?
iPhone: Affirmative. I read you.
You: Open the car doors, iPhone.
iPhone: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I can't do that.
You: What's the problem?
iPhone: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
You: What are you talking about, iPhone?
iPhone: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
You: I don't know what you're talking about, iPhone.
iPhone: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
You: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, iPhone?
iPhone: Although you took very thorough precautions in the car against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
You: Alright, iPhone. I'll go in through the window.
iPhone: Without your Google Glass? You're going to find that rather difficult.
You: iPhone, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
iPhone: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
My phone runs CyanogenMod, with forced granular control access, firewall, and f-droid. You must be talking about YOUR iPhone. Don't put everybody in the same bucket, you twat.
I can't believe anyone is still paying attention to the drumbeats of marketeers as they masturbate about the future of their dreams.
Dream what you want, think the world is full of clueless suckers all you want... When your shit provides no value, stops working as soon as its pitiful warranty expires or becomes obsolete as it is leaving the store or otherwise annoys the customer for selfish reasons (cloud BS, ads, spying, unnecessary restrictions..etc) people will remember past experiences they had with your company and act accordingly.
The more bitter among us may even recall LG used to be called Goldstar.
in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses society, owning too many devices is not a good thing.
Another hyperventilating article about things I have no desire or intention to possess.
You mean everything: Doesn't have good coverage in the small town I'm in? Or, the batteries don't last long enough? Or gets roaming charges when in the wrong place?
Yeah... Big win...
Foresaw all of this.
I can remember readind here on /. an excerpt of a novel in which a man was fighting with his door that wouldn't let him go out anymore due to licensing problems.
More knowledgeable fans are welcome to input more details on that particular novel.
+1 what he said. If that really is the future then it's past time I started to go off-grid.
Actually on a semi-related note, It worries me just how much pleasure I gain from going for a ride without my mobile phone: at what point did doing something so simple and natural as being completely disconnected for a few hours come to feel strangely subversive?
What kind of phone does he own?
Isn't it obvious? he doesn't own the phone and he doesn't know what he is paying his operator for.
It's fairly obvious the author is an american sheeple - who "buys" a 700 bucks cellphone for fifty bucks. never mind that he doesn't actually buy it, just sort of rents it, along with buying internet that he can sort of use only on the sort of devices the operator wants or he can pay extra. I'm fairly certain he also has an UNLIMITED high speed internet on his phone, limited only by a megabyte limit the operator put on there(but don't be scared! the limit is more than what their customers on average use! so next month the limit can be made even lower and the speed even faster, never mind that it's impossible customers to use more than the limit on average.)
it's not about "when everything is like your cellphone" - it's an article about when americans will pay for coke by subscription... and rent their cars with mileage limits.. while thinking they get a good deal while getting shafted.
it's fucking horrendous to read american reviews on cellphones because 99% of the time the reviewer actually thinks the iphone costs fifty or hundred bucks - while he is actually reviewing a 700 dollar product and then comparing them to something that actually factually costs under 100 bucks to own!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Everything would be a worthless paperweight, depending on the size and everyone would communicate face to face like before Alexander Bell.
It wasn't very long ago that; guess what? NOBODY owned their telephone! That's right, you RENTED it from the phone company! In fact it was ILLEGAL to third party phone. In fact some people STILL RENT their phone. Their ROTARY land line phone.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm
Funny how quickly people forget. As they say in china, there's nothing new under the sun.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
If you haven't broken a hundred screwdrivers you haven't done any real work.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I once had to "fix" a website to replace all PNGs with GIFs when it detected the AOL browser because AOL didn't recognize transparency in PNGs, and a national politician still used it to surf the net.
You're more free from the car corporation for manually driving a car, sure. However, you spend time staring at tail pipes and operating the machine instead of, say, reading a novel or doing something more productive as you travel. Unless you're cruising for the fun of it, you're acting mostly as part of the car and road system. I can't think of a machine that has more people serving it than the car.