Analog contained an article speculating on this almost 10 years ago. In the
article, the intelligent systems were cars. In the article, wireless
communication systems were not built in, and the cars nominally were not
aware that there are other cars. However, they do manage to learn to
communicate with the result that the subject of the story learns:
1. That there are other "owners."
2. Owners have different characteristics - such as how they respond to
maintenance and repair requests.
3. Owners can changed, and tend to change following major system failures.
4. This change is usually accompanied by significant repair/maintenance.
The car in the story has an owner that does not respond to maintenance and
repair requests, so it simulates a major system failure to force a change of
Now consider if the story were written today: with built in communications
systems and the personalization of these systems, a car would know both that
there are different owners at from the start, know who the owner is, and be
able to learn the history of the owner from other cars....
So how well do you maintain your property? ;-)
on 01.10.2 5:43 AM, Nick May at nick_at_kyushu.com wrote:
> keitai-l_at_appelsiini.net writes:
>> Meanwhile, the kettles could chat about how similar their owner's usage
>> patterns are and whether these are related to genetic features or
>> education... Perhaps the usage patterns are like fingerprints and kettles
>> could be used by the NSA to detect where a certain person is...
> Just as long as they don't give the pot a communications facility - as is
> well known, pots like to pick fights and it would be the end of the
> (oi! - you, kettle! - Jimmy! - are you calling me black?!)
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Received on Tue Oct 2 20:42:49 2001