Cyborgs Vs. Rooms, Two Visions for the Future of Computing

If I don't like the room, I'm able to get up and leave. It might be difficult and annoying, and I might have to end up in the middle of the woods or desert or something, but I can do it. (Yes, we are increasingly making this harder and harder to do, by cyborging "the system" itself -- think things like the demise of cash, or the requirements for digital ID cards, or ... -- but you get the idea.)

If I'm a cyborg, how do I leave? Can I leave? Do I even control myself anymore? Being a cyborg sounds great if I control my "wetware". Which I probably do not. (Do you control the computing device you're reading this message on? Really? The Linux kernel being open source might be really nice (it is really nice), but even if you have the de jure ability to control it, do you have the practical ability to do so? And then there's the hardware. Any way you trace the hardware, you'll end up with quartz wafers from Spruce Pine. Do you have any way to replicate that?) There is no way in hell I'd want to be someone else's cyborg, which means that with the state of the tech world, I don't want to be a cyborg at all.

I suspect wearables will be cheaper than augmented rooms, so they will probably "win" in the sense that mobile phones outnumber desktop computers.

That being said, I suspect the experience of being in an augmented room will be "worth it" and many people will pay big bucks for them.

But it seems more likely that like other technologies developed by humanity, we will see that computers are not efficient for, or extensible to, every task, and people will naturally tend to reach for computers where they are helpful and be disinclined to do so when they aren't helpful. Some computers will be in rooms, some will get carried around or worn, some will be integrated into infrastructure.

Similar to the automobile, steam powered motors, and electricity, we may predict a future where the technology totally pervades our lives, but in reality we eventually develop a sort of infrastructure that delimits the tool's use to a certain extent, whether it is narrow or wide. If that's the case then the work for the field is less about shoving the tech into every interaction, and more about developing better abstractions to allow people to use compute in an empowering rather than a disempowering way.

If I had to choose today, I'd 100% go for the rooms. I don't really like wearing anything, and I like the idea of being able to just "walk out" of it, kind of like when I close my laptop. Only problem is tech might become omnipresent (it kind of already is) so one would not be able to just "leave".

Keep up, please?