alt Hacker NewsBack in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.
I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.
I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.
A possible catalyst might have been the 1993 AT&T "You Will" Ad Campaign. It was very prescient but also the joke is that the commercials ended with "and the company that will bring it to you will be AT&T", which did not pan out in the ways that ad campaign thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo