Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Thesis 45

Users will understand their transactions with everyware to be essentially social in nature.

There's good reason to believe that users will understand their transactions with ubiquitous systems to be essentially social in nature, whether consciously or otherwise—and this will be true even if there is only one human party to a given interaction.

Norbert Wiener, the "father of cybernetics," had already intuited something of this in his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: according to Wiener, when confronted with cybernetic machines, human beings found themselves behaving as if the systems possessed agency.

This early insight was ...