John Gruber quotes this rather eloquent paragraph from Benedict Evans’s 16 Mobile Theses:

Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those use cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.

It’s a nice vision for the future and perhaps fairly insightful as well. But as long as the Internet of Things relies on increasingly restrictive and proprietary APIs and hardware which must utilize them, I see no reason to be overly optimistic on the time table for our connected utopia. On the flip side, well-crafted and open APIs won’t preclude the construction of a nightmare surveillance state or slow increasing economic inequality. In fact, better technologies might only serve to grease our decent into one hell or another.

We have much work to do before we can laugh at ourselves for (not) forgetting how “smart” our devices have become.