There are other areas where knowledge (and wisdom) with regard to propinquity might be valued. Physical and mental health professionals will certainly be addressing issues of stress and overwhelm associated with this propinquity, as will professionals in the fields of executive coaching, leadership development—and advanced human factors analysis. Of greatest importance is a more fundamental observation: we don’t yet know how this knowledge will be of greatest value—the human-embedded technologies are changing too fast to make any kind of confident predictions about the psychological impacts and remedies. What we do know with confidence is that human-embedded technologies are here to stay and are growing in number and variety. Propinquity might be an obscure word, but it represents a fundamental revolution in the intimate relationship between humans and their technologies.
