Excuse the shovelware. I just found a position paper I wrote for a CHI2004 workshop called "Lost in Ambient Intelligence." This is a very short paper that' a recap of the argument I made in my animism essay of 2003, but formatted for CHI. I wanted to link to it mostly so that I'd have it handy. Here's the abstract:
I posit that the more widespread ubiquitous computing becomes, the more people's explanations of technology will resemble animism. As common technology becomes more interconnected and smarter, people's understanding of its functionality ceases to be based on a mechanistic model and becomes more anthropomorphic. This model in turn changes the way that the creators of ubicomp devices have to approach their designs to consider systems of objects and users' acceptance of a level of unpredictability.
It's a 150K PDF.
