Does your thermostat know when you're approaching your own front door? Does your watch know you're stressed before you do? When your car rewrites its own software at 3 a.m., do you know what changed?

In 1982, a group of Carnegie Mellon grad students wired a Coke machine to ARPANET because they were tired of walking down the hall to find warm soda. Two questions. Is there Coke? Is it cold? That was the entire revolution.

Marc and Renee trace the line from that hallway to the world we live in now. Mark Weiser's dream of calm, invisible computing at Xerox PARC. RFID tags giving products identities they never asked for. The cloud removing every reason not to collect data. The moment your thermostat stopped being an appliance and became a temperature node in a global behavioral dataset.

Along the way, the Internet of Things went from reporting to deciding. Traffic grids reroute themselves. Buildings adjust before you walk in. Sensors feed models. Models trigger actions. Actions reshape your environment. And somewhere between convenience and autonomy, something changed. It used to be "is the soda cold?" Now it's "who chose the objective function your house is optimizing for, and what does it know about you that you haven't figured out yet?"

Notes - For android users that want to detect smart glasses nearby - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses&hl=en_GB&pli=1

For Apple users - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nearby-glasses-original/id6761056896

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.