Word: objectives
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...America the land of opportunity? Or a materialist hell where people barter their dignity for trinkets? Ask the woman who's fishing under a male model's kilt in order to identify a hidden object (don't ask) and win a trip to Scotland--it's both! The makers of this raucous game show do research on potential contestants, drawn from the audience, recruiting family and friends to help pose personalized, howlingly degrading challenges. The champs win fabulous vacations but must leave immediately, hence the title. Sometimes inspired, always juvenile, Toothbrush makes you feel better about whatever...
...perfect diamond. Imagine a machine that dismembers dioxin molecules, one by one, into their component parts. Or a device that cruises the human bloodstream, seeks out cholesterol deposits on vessel walls and disassembles them. Or one that takes grass clippings and remanufactures them into bread. Literally every physical object in the world, from computers to cheese, is made of molecules, and in principle a nanomachine could construct all of them...
That does not, however, mean that we will one day, as a species, submit to the indignity of the chip--if only because the chip is likely to shortly be as quaint an object as the vacuum tube or the slide rule...
...another way, they will not know "computers" as a distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing, of the fully wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The idea of a device that "only" computes will perhaps be the ultimate archaism in a world in which the fridge or the toothbrush is potentially as smart as any other object, including you, a world in which intelligent objects communicate, routinely and constantly, with one another and with...
...Internet has actually been something of a boon when it comes to reading: people with more Beanie Babies than books on their shelves spend more time reading than they used to as they surf from site to site. But it's not a book, dammit, that perfect object that speaks without speaking, needs no batteries and never crashes unless you throw it in the corner. So, yes, there'll be books. Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the binding...