I will admit that I’ve only thought on this end of things here and there. But, its there. And at least in respect to thinking about these implications of mobile, it makes sense to at least broach the subject: what if we look at mobile the same way we look at animals? What would the ministry implication look like in that respect?

What Got Me Down This Line
Of those implications to mobility, and evolutions within this space, one of the areas I see coming down the pipe is that of cybernetics and AI. This idea that technologies can be grafted onto the organic/natural facilities that we have, and with some kind of computational nature that goes a bit beyond what we might have realized within ourselves. Its not a prediction of where things are going so much as it is an observation. And as such, insights on the subject have interested me beyond the fictional accounts of future-scapes that I read often as a child:

…Donna Haraway, theorist on our transformation into cyborgs, published ‘The Companion Species Manifesto’ in 2003. It addresses the relationship between domestic dogs and humans, but there is much in there to inspire designers of smartphones, apps and agents.

“Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways.”

Using inspirations from theory such as Haraway, and fiction – such as Philip Pullman’s ‘Daemons’ from his ‘Dark Materials’ books – we can perhaps imagine a near-future that is richer and weirder than the current share-everything-all-the-time/total-gamified-personal-productivity obsessions of silicon valley.

A future of digital daemons would be one of close relationships with software that learned and acted intuitively – perhaps inscrutably at first, but with a maxim of ‘do no harm, with maximum charm’…

Read the rest of Berg London’s snippet of ‘Companion Species’.

With my mobile, as highlighted in a piece about contextual UIs at my personal website, there’s this interpleay between the context of my environment (day, night, connection of Bluetooth accessories, etc.) which alters the state of my mobile. Even so much that its basically now a matter of “just keeping it fed” with power of cellular connectivity, that makes it just as much a living accessory to my life as it does a tool to enable activities. I can see this perspective that a mobile is very much adapting and adjusting to its environment, and I’m its caretaker. Which leads me to wonder what implications that has when it is a tool for more than just notification of some communication event.

A Perspective
The reading that comes to mind is found in Genesis 1:28:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The materials that make up mobiles are found in the earth. The ores and knitting together of them by electrons and other ingenoius methods have made something that was once not “living” into something so attached ot our daily lives that to some degree, it is now given life. We speak to our mobiles and they respond (Apple’s Siri as a recent example). We personalize them custom ringtones, themes, and such. Then we add abilities to them with the applications we install (like that scene in the Matrix where Neo was trained by simply downloading the knowledge into his brain). They aren’t sentient, but there is some aspect of stewardship to these devices that very much mimics how we manage our associations with animals and other entities on this planet.

But, mobiles aren’t like this you say? Aren’t they? Don’t you cradle your’s in a case, maybe even a near-personalized one? Perhaps you went for a lesser case for the mobile, but have that custom ringtone or ring-back tone – you know, that song that’s createed by you, or has some knd of meaning because its like someone or something close to you? Wallpapers, alert settings, even the arrangemetn of the apps that you use, carefully curated and managed on something that doesn’t live… or does it?

I’m not making the argument that at some point devices will be much more llife-like. In some respects, they will be, and they won’t be called mobiles. But, in the methods and behaviors of use that we have, there is this almost lfe-like attention we pay to them as if they were compensated assistants. To that, we must ask the question that goes beyond tools to something more like accountability and stewardship – if your mobile could talk about you, what would it say about how you’ve treated it and what you do with it?