Sounds to me like someone liked his Google Now a bit too much and went on an extrapolating spree. On the one hand, I think predictive knowledge is a really cool feature, and I can envision a future where information is handed to you as soon as you want to know it. I like Google Now, and wish it would work better; it was of great use to me when I flew to Hong Kong, as it has a card with all your flight information. But on the other hand, it's just that: a cool feature. I don't think it is a good foundation to build information technologies on. It is, however, a nice interactive display of information. I think that that book of yours didn't get that right, especially with that hotel example. It was trying to imagine an IT world based around predictive knowledge, instead of seeing the tech for what it's worth: a nice representation of knowledge, a layer on top of current systems. Good way to phrase it. It's exactly why I was disappointed to find out that Google didn't use real self-driving. I don't want my car to be dependant on an external, locked system. There was a great article a while back here, about who owns place. With Google's head start in the mapping business (and to be fair, their maps are the best both cartographically as well as aesthetically), they have a very dominant place in the mapping business. Currently, there are good alternatives, but imagine a similar dominant force in a market with a much higher bar for entry: the radar equipped AI batallions of tech that are Google cars. I'm writing this from a train, sitting only meters from a very capable operator who could be replaced by AI far easier than any car envirnoment. Yet I'm happier that it is just a person. Sidenote: I can't wait to see what Germany thinks of this. They've been the only country to question Google's ethics with streetview. Might be a smart move to do more with GIS. It is already quite up my alley. I wish ArcGIS was up Adobe's level of refinement, though. The thing with this subject is that there is a fairly large chance that a proper Google prototype will never make it to the production stage, simply because states or countries might not allow it. It took crazy ol' California to try it out, after all. Besides, it might face similar perception problems that planes have now: as soon as one crashes, it makes the news. A bad start can halt the development of this tech for decades, easily. If I may extrapolate, that is.It was the breathless, uninformed cheerleading for the death of privacy.
I think the world would benefit from an exploration of the implications of a transportation system where key components are locked behind a paywall on a server remote from the vehicle or owner. That's something new under the sun.
Bank on it.
I think it's worth looking into. For that matter, it might be worth reading the book. As I said, they only reported on people who talked to them, and they were rosy as fuck; that said, they talked to Ford, which apparently plans on consolidating down to economy, luxury and mid-size cars that are going to be largely differentiated by software. My problem with "the Internet of Things" is that it used to be called "telemetry." Telemetry is valuable - it gives you instrumentation for things you need to know. 'The Internet of Things' is predicated on putting sensors on shit and then figuring out how you're going to use them. It's the wrong approach, in my opinion; not everything that sucks power needs an IP address. Somethings definitely benefit though. GM wants to call it "the Industrial Internet" and observes that if telemetry improves the efficiency of their aircraft engines by 1%, it'll save airlines three billion dollars. That's a very different discussion than the "smart fridges" that are generally talked about by breathless tech evangelists after every CES.