I agree. Somebody is going to open that Pandora's box, though. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person who is concerned. I think it's an eventuality, however. Few young developers today have had to deal with walled gardens and don't understand how bad they are. Worse, today's platforms give an unprecedented amount of control to the platform owner to the detriment of the hardware's actual owner, and developers seem more than willing to help create those mechanisms of control. What's going to happen when nobody is left who actually owns their own computer?
And people growing up with today web-first, mobile-first computing model have no clue of the power and capabilities computers have. With data being owned and hidden by apps/webapps, limited interoperability, nonexistent shortcuts, little to no means of automation of tasks, people won't even be able to conceive new ways to use their machines, because the tools for that aren't available.
You just gave me a horrible vision of a robotic hand perched over a smartphone screen being programmed to touch the screen to "automate" tasks because nobody will know any better. (Of course that would never work because our smartphones have front-facing cameras and software to detect faces and verify that we're alive... >sigh<)
Yeah, this is the input equivalent of the analog loophole :).
Now ordinarily, on PCs, you do that by means of simulated keypresses and mouseclicks, using scripting capabilities of the OS or end-user software like AutoHotkey. In the web/mobile-first, corporate-sandboxed reality, I can't imagine this capability being available, so Arduino and robot hand it is.
(But yeah, bastards will eventually put a front-facing depth-sensing camera, constantly verifying the user, arguing that it's for "security" reasons.)
