now are attached to an object, in a personal way, if we allow ourselves to be overly anthropomorphic.

Personal electronic devices are split in two related categories. The first one is that of hand-held devices, the second one is that of chip centered devices. The first category encompasses cellular phones, personal digital assistants, music players, portable game consoles, global positioning satellites navigators and other such objects of everyday use. The second category encompasses chip cards (bank cards with embedded chips), Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM: the removable chip-bearing card inside most cellular phones next to the battery), Radio-Frequency Identification tags (RFID: the chip-bearing tags used to pay the highway toll, or to identify products at the supermarket), personal storage key fobs and other such objects directed at identifying, authenticating, authorizing and carrying private information.

All those devices are networked, or on their way to being networked, because their function is to involve the user in participatory activities, with institutions (such as banks, government, phone operators) and with others with similar devices (such as communicating via voice and messaging, or gaming). Hand-held devices have screens, and speakers, and other means of communication with their owner; chip-centered devices have built-in security mechanisms at their core. Hand-held devices and chip-centered devices are related in that chip-centered devices are often found inside hand-held devices, where their function is to take charge of the most private and secure function of the combination. However, one can find hand-held devices that do not contain a chip-centered device, as they handle security functions on their own, like the current generation of music players (they handle digital rights protection), and chip-centered devices that are autonomous, like the bank chip cards (when needed, they hook up to specialized computers, called readers, for power and communication with the world).

Personal electronic devices use both the networks born of the telecommunication industry and those born of the computer industry. An example of a telecommunication network is GSM (Global System Mobile), the ubiquitous standard of billions of cellular telephones. An example of computer network is of course the Internet. At the time of writing, network technologies are merging in a phenomenon called convergence.

Whereas the personal electronic devices manufacturers wouldn’t let the IBM mainframe and the Digital Equipment mini-computer hardware stories replay, they also were wiser from having seen the Microsoft and Intel stories unfold in software and microprocessors. At the present time, no single player dominates the personal electronic devices market, be it in hardware, microprocessors or software. We’ll expand later on the fundamentals of that story, but in the meanwhile, we observe that personal electronic devices should play toward personal computers the same role as personal computers played to mini-computers and mini-computers to mainframes in their time. It is with such devices that we suggest the human to computer interface has entered the world of complex policy considerations. More than simply reflect our individual commands, we seek computer assistance in projecting our cognitive needs into the cyber-world.

Before coming to the end of this chapter on the mechanics of human and computer evolution, we would like to devote some quality time to smart cards. Smart card is a generic name for most forms of chip-centered devices. They are used daily by the billions, as they are the heart of most cellular phones in the world. Anyone owning a GSM cellular phone, which means most everyone around the world now (more than two billion at the time of this writing) can open the back of the phone, remove the battery, and find next to it a removable smart card the size of a thumbnail. At the center is a metallic module and at the center of the module is a chip the size of a teardrop. This

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