Found this Harvard seminar about the Internet of Things, and it turned out to be a bit different from what I expected – more opinionated, for a start. The lecturer is James Whittaker (medium.com/@docjamesw), and part of what he’s talking about – though he doesn’t use the specific terms – is the kind of situationally-aware computing that Google is working on right now. 

One of his speculations gave me an idea for an SF story involving a woman whose living comes from being a taste-setter. A step beyond a blogger; companies give her clothes and accessories because they want other people to see her wearing them and buy them (which generates affiliate income for her), and venues like restaurants and nightclubs pay her to come and be seen in them. She’s an aspiration model. All of this is guided by subtle interactions with machines; a self-driving car turns up at her door and she gets into it and goes to where it takes her. 

But what happens when the machines start guiding her away from a man she’s met because being seen with him would lower her aspiration value – and she wants to be with him?

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/course/seminars-internet-things-video/id1069443090?i=359205504&mt=2