Today, Freestyle Coke machines let us design our own soft drinks, freestyle yogurt shops let us create our own confections.
Has our relation with machines made us feel so deprived of human contact that we befriend anyone and shack up with whoever has a mattress?
This dramatic and rapid evolution of the relationship between people and their machines places us at the dawn of yet another new era, one we are calling the Age of Context.
Since the manufacture of most products begins with the bending, shaping or machining of metal, the demand for equipment that bends, shapes and machines tells us a great deal about where economic development is headed.
"There's no way that existing machines will get us where we need to go, " Venter says.
"There is no way existing machines will get us where we need to go, " Venter says.
Likewise, it is expressed in the fears that these machines are changing us, as never before, into something new and strange.
Race Against the Machine seems to be another in the near interminable series of books that tell us that machines are soon going to be able to do everything therefore no one at all will have a job.
Thus everything will indeed be done by machines and thus none of us will have a job.
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Our brains evolved through the millennia into incredible prediction machines, designed to help us make sense of our environment.
Brynjolfsson said machines are not here to mimic us, they are best used to do things differently than the way humans solve problems.
Machines are learning to think like us by recognizing patterns in our behavior, which has all been laid out quite nicely across our email, browsing behavior, web searches, app downloads and even our friends.
Acer's range of CULV-based Timeline machines should be trickling out to US stores any moment now, and if you're wondering if any of these are right for you, we've rounded up a trio of reviews that are guaranteed to be relevant to your interests.
According to Mr Krebs, who has blogged extensively about the various kit used by criminals in the US to target cash machines - they can skim the data contained on that magnetic strip just by using a cheap MP3 player - although more complex software is then required to decode it.
But as computer society has evolved, many machines have quietly declined to speak with us, preferring instead to communicate with like-minded life forms.
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Devices as non-intrusive and intimate as Shine show how machines are learning how to work with us in the age of wearables, rather than the other way round, says Olof Schybergson, chief executive of Fjord, a design consultancy.
No matter how many worn-out items break, no matter how much our out-of-date machinery slows us down, no matter how many people tease us for clinging to fax machines over email, I will keep this factory going as-is.
Now, the couple sitting across from my husband and I at another artfully worn wooden table are playing dominoes, in what can only be described as an ironic manner, given no locals have played dominoes since the invention of fruit machines (slot machines as they are called in the US, also known as one armed bandits).
And you thought the machines were going to rise up and murder us all.
If the oceans do not make your heart go pitter-patter, how about engineering a bacteria that eats carbon dioxide -- and thus helps protect the world from overheating -- AND excretes fuel which will allow us to drive our cars and machines, without oil?
Knowledge of any skills other than those of the technological elite will become a redundant concept because all the information we will ever need will be instantly available to us all, and because intelligent machines will be able to undertake almost any task better and more quickly that we can ourselves.
In any event, what it says can tell us a lot about our relationship to machines.
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For starters, the company will be showcasing its Wind U115 and U120 netbooks for the first time in the public eye at CES, and those oh-so-intriguing NetOn all-in-one machines we spotted overseas will also be making their US debut.
ENGADGET: MSI at CES: Wind U115 / U120, NetOn all-in-one PC, gaming laptops galore
Unfortunately, Acer was so busy selling us on the benefits of all these new machines that they forgot a few important details, so both pricing and release dates for each and every one remain a big fat mystery for now.
The US Navy is funding the project and says the machines might ultimately be deployed alongside humans.
He asked whether any of us in the room had trading software on our machines and, if so, whether we were inclined to use it.
Dr Mark Stokes, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Oxford, said it was an "exciting" piece of research that brought us closer to the concept of dream-reading machines.
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