Foreign residents in Tokyo wanting to switch their non-Japanese earned driver's license to a local variant inevitably make a pilgrimage to counter 27 on the 2nd floor of Samezu Driving School, tucked away in deepest Shinagawa. As one of the only places in Tokyo that offers this service the waiting room is a bukkake don of Tokyo's foreign residents - lending this corner of the building an air of infomality - when its time to pick up a form and head to the next counter visitors are addressed as ~san as opposed to the more honorific and generally elongated ~samaaaa more commonly heard resonating around the concrete walls of most local government offices and doctor's waiting rooms.

It just so happens that the building is a worthy destination for the amateur cultural anthropologist: from the non-ambient strip lighting reflecting off linoleum floors to the lengthy process that switching a license requires involving form filling, eye-tests, payments, photographs spanning half a day. But why am I here? In a world where our ability to location-shift ourselves from the tasks at hand what is the purpose of traveling to this physical building? How might the future perfect authority-to-drive be bestowed upon tomorrow's would-be driver?

Why does anyone need to take a driving test? Or any test for that matter? Imagine never having to take a test in your life ever again - not at school, university, in the work place.

Instead assessment is ongoing, everywhere - continuous learning pushed to its il/logical extreme. The authority required to start task X or access service Y assessed in real time drawing on a life's worth of data pushed through a filter of you in the here and now.

Instead of that one off driving test, the vehicle makes an assessment of whether you're fit to drive at that point when you decide to drive: it knows the time you've spent behind the wheel (and for novices time spent in the driving simulator); can factor in you ability to successfully complete hand-eye co-ordination tasks; that yesterday you partied late, drunk a bottle of wine and only slept three hours; the effects of the music that you've just listened to on your way here; that you have a tendency to become sexually aroused by the passenger you intend to pick up later in the journey (to comprehend how arousal and other emotions have on decision making processes Predictably / Irrational is a good read). The vehicle also has a fair idea of the journey that you are likely to take, the state of the road and of course other drivers.

Bearing in mind if we can truly make all this stuff work then we've probably solved self-driving cars, and putting aside the techno-Utopian dream for a moment. In this scenario just because someone is not 'fit to drive' don't imagine for a moment that they will barred from driving. As anyone in the insurance industry knows you can put a figure on the loss of life or limb,and whilst your society hasn't evolved to the point where there's an accepted culture of paying blood money, maybe it will come around sooner than you think. When you have the resources to pay, and the process is even marginally socially acceptable i.e. it's hard coded into the system - the ability to gamble, to take risks, to 'drive impaired' becomes a consumer choice, a luxury, a sign of wealth. From the roulette wheel to the spinning wheels of a dented, bloody, overturned car.

Yes, of course, the 'driving test' will continue to live on. As a rite of passage eventually going the way of the 'glove box' and the 'rear view mirror', a purpose forgotten within a couple of generations of net time.

If you've spent time in a large organisation these past few years you've probably brushed up against that early 21th century notion of 'life long learning' - that it's never too late to re skill, retool, learn something new. We are undergoing a fundamental change in the way we relate to objects and the way (connected) objects relate to us. 'Life long learning' is no longer about you in relation to what you can offer to achieve you potential - but rather the systems' ability to learn about you over the course of it, and your lifetime.

If we can create a working system that assesses your ability to do x, y and z - through a continuous assessment of you, a system that practically removes the need for 'the driving test' then that same system is going be smart enough to figure out how to maximise your human potential.

Which means that it will be smart enough to maximise it's own potential.

If you see a book lying on a desk do you align it to the desk's edges? Are you a habitual aligner?

What assumptions can you make about a motorbike parked at an angle to the curb, close to a pedestrian crossing, laden with goods?

As we slip our future perfect self-parking vehicles into cruise control, someone somewhere is imagining a world of 'perfectly' parked cars - perpendicularly aligned to a city's curbs. But to what extent could or should the self-driving/self parking vehicle adopt the nuances of their owners? The cultural stereotypes associated with their marque? Would a self-parking Fiat be deliberately less perpendicular than a BMW?

What happens when cars with different cultural/personal/technical assumptions about how to park try to align with one another? Who or what provides a fixed point of reference in an otherwise relative world?

Related: vehicle positioning in a Taiwanese parking lot and the parking thread.

The objects and services that are considered normal within a particular geography: cupboard stabiliser from the 'prepare for earthquake section' in Tokyu Hands.

Wasabi lettuce no less.

A feature of contactless cards is the ability to authenticate (pass through ticket barriers/make payments/...) without removing the card from the wallet or purse.

Except that as the cards become more prevalent, and the features of one card start to trump another people end up carrying multiple cards with overlapping functions. The only way for the user to know which card to use? Gosh - to remove the card from the wallet. Convenience indeed.

It's easy to remove out of date cards from a wallet - so why aren't they? Users imagine that the old cards contain some kind of residual value but at the time when the wallet is being cleared out they are nowhere near a machine that could communicate it's current status/credit, many are carried in-finitum.

Just because the cards are read differently by the system don't assume that the user will always remember which card is used for which purpose. The TASPO contactless card used to authenticate that the person buying cigarettes from a vending machine is in fact over 18, is frequently mistaken for the PASMO card used to travel on the subway - requiring user-education in the form of signs at the subway entrance. This is only the beginning - at this rate we're going to see contactless cards with some form of ticketing/service access/monetary credit handed out for free - with the service provider making money either from the advertising on the card, leveraging insights from tracking usage, or merely as an encouragement for users to switch to a newer system, with more profitable features naturally. The number of contactless cards in the wallet competing for your attention will only increase.

One card to rule them all?

Wishful thinking.

Product recall poster situated in the mountain hut boot room.

Whilst cars have been 'phoning home' diagnostic information for some time, less connected objects are still reliant on more traditional means to know when it's time enough. Contexts in which an/the ubiquitous sensor network can speed up the product recall process by identifying instances of the product in use and notify their owner. And contexts where manufacturers use the same network information to push consumers into upgrading perfectly acceptable, if a little aging products in the name of safety blurring the line between ownership and rental.