We Are What We Do Not Automate

I do recognize that my tastes are not mainstream, but I value companies that also recognize that.

EDIT: Ok, maybe not fix myself, but I appreciate stuff that's cheap to get fixed, and maybe a little old-school. There's not too much that I can actually fix, but there's a larger constellation of stuff that I understand the cost of.

We have to eat, but we don't have to eat with forks; we may have to cover our bodies for some protection against weather, but we don't have to have drape ourselves with some tribal logo.

In summary, as technology progresses to the point where most (if not all) common tasks can be automated the uniqueness of the UI will be what is left to the user to control.

The scary thought behind that is that, eventually, we might evolve past consciousness, without our external behaviour changing at all (self-driving cars? Self-driving people.) All our acts of culture and art and science will be so ingrained into our genetic structure that we'll start doing them without having to meditate on the how of it (akin, oddly, to spiritual Enlightenment or Nirvana, through "mindfulness." For a more down-to-earth view, a permanent "flow" state.) We'll all, technically, become http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie s, until something shakes up our culture enough that we need to think about what we're doing again. Hopefully, though, we can keep introducing those shake-ups from within.