I’m sitting there this morning realizing how ubiquitous my cell phone has become, and I realized that for all of the smarts it contains, it’s really not using much of it unless I ask it to. Why doesn’t it do more? Why isn’t it studying me and learning what I want it to do?
For example, it must know by now that at 1 o’clock each weekday afternoon, I either turn it to silent or check to make sure it is so. This is because I have class and a ringing device costs you $5. Couldn’t it watch my pattern for a week or two and then project that I will do today what I’ve done every Tuesday beforehand?
Or how about the feature Apple offers where you can go through .me and find your phone if it is lost. Why do YOU have to go do that? Doesn’t your phone have a pretty good idea when it’s lost? Let’s say I have the phone in my pocket every day I go out the door. Every day. Since forever. Might the fact that tomorrow, the phone is still sitting where it was left, unmoved for 36 hours straight give it the sense to know something is up? Might it not “call” my designated contact, or email someone to say “hey, where are you? Do you know where I am?”
How about security? We put so much into these phones, with the banking apps, passwords, etc. Aren’t we worried if someone gets there hands on our phone? Sure, but what can we do about it? Well, the phone should be pretty good about identifying its owner, no? We use it every day, and though we might not see it, we have some very subtle patterns of usage and behavior that can’t be duplicated that easily. Can’t the phone identify and track this, such that when someone else tries to use the phone, using it in an entirely different way, that it thinks that something might be amiss and emails for confirmation: “Hey Matte, am I still in your pocket? Should I really be letting you into your online bank account or let you post to WordPress?”
It might be weird to wake up one day to HAL in our pockets, but I think a device we encourage to be self-aware will do us less harm than a really smart device we continually expect to play dumb.