Fred Wilson has a great post about what technology was rare enough for one generation to count but ubiquitous for the next.
• Electric Motors
• Chips
• Networked Devices
He also talks about how the networked devices of the future will be dumb.
So my bet is that most “things” will be dumb and the smarts will be in the phone or in the cloud.
But I respectfully disagree. In my post about computing paradigms swinging like a pendulum I stated that Moore’s Law means that dumb devices become smart over time.
While I expect Fred to be correct in the short term, dumb devices connected to smart hubs, over the long run I expect each of those devices to be imbued with more intelligence than Siri has today.
I believe that while you and I know the number of “smart” devices we own, the next generation won’t be able to keep count.