SF writer Paul DiFilippo has a wonderful story on SciFi.com called And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon that’s funny, dirty, and technologically prescient. It concerns itself with “blebs” — composite gadget made byt he spontaneous merging of smart household objects that are a little too interoperable.
The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses–both hardware and software–were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.
If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things were different today.
Most devices nowadays were made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the paws of geckos, these MEMS surfaces could bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko could skitter across the ceiling.
(Thanks, Steve!)