New Scientist reports on Smart Cell phone Antennas, which have Autonomous software agents which can talk to neighbouring antennas and do load balancing... This is goign into to testing during the Athens Olympics
In an Economist feature The World In 2004 A story on the Smart Dust revolution.
Alun Andersen, the Editor in Chief comments that for decades we have considered progress to be packing of more and more transistors on less and less silicon... Progress he argues is, things like the coming smart dust revolution. Smart dust or more accurately networked intelligenece to do hazaar things like do remote surveliiance for the military. or the use of RFID in supermarkets... enabling tracking of merchandise and a fully automated staff less supermakret...
For almost 40 years we have all been subscribing to a simple dogma about the growth of the information age: progress means making more and more computing power available at lower and lower prices. Back in 1965 Gordon Moore laid out his famous law that the number of components that could be squeezed on to a silicon chip would double every year or two. Now everybody can buy a laptop computer with the computing power that entire nations wer...
Talk about crazy inventions... Matsushita has developed an Intelligent screwdriver . It can be pre-programmed. As one readerd somments on the quoted post. it is more a luxury item than a practical tool...
an even better quote...
My Sears el-cheapo 14V screwdriver is a fair bit damn more intelligent than that one, I'd bet...
... It's powered by my finger, which has a pretty straight pipe to my brain.
Beat that, Matsushita.
:)