Just wait until government and industry lobbyists get their hands on it. The powered PEX expander or wire terminal crimpler will need someone who's in the database as having the proper license in order to enable it after you buy it. You cross state lines and your tools won't work because you won't have the valid license. You try and use your tools near the property line and it won't let you because the DB has the wrong coordinates and thinks you're trying to work at the facility next door and you need to be in the union to do that. Of course the company will sell you the unlocked version of the $200 tool for $3k. If you bring too many power tools from different owners to a the same place and that place isn't in the DB as having a building permit the building inspector will show up with some thin veneer of parallel construction.

(Hopefully pressure from the low end tool manufacturers who try and compete on value keeps these kinds of things from happening.)

> Hopefully pressure from the low end tool manufacturers who try and compete on value keeps these kinds of things from happening.

Looking at the sad state of TVs (where the cheap brands just hop on the bandwagon and make a quick buck), I am not very hopeful. Everyone will be as consumer-hostile as they can get away with if they think they can make a few cents that way.

Yeah. I was desperately trying to be charitable, but I suspect you're correct and this is the motivating reason.

> My sci-fi brain is imaging motors with wacky windings that need specially PWM'ed streams of electricity to spin effectively, etc...

After having recently read too many military sci-fi novels in short succession[0], I started to think how warring alien species would secure their military hardware against reverse engineering. I came to a similar conclusion - there would likely be a whole field of making every possible bit of a device coupled with every other bit, kind of like homomorphic encryption, but done with atoms and fields instead of bits. Like you said - windings that only work if you PWM the voltage precisely, perhaps according to some algorithm that compensates for those windings being scrambled, softly shorted, and otherwise smeared across half of the device's interior surface. Etc. Impossible to fix, but also impossible to figure out without original schematics.

And yes, the way the market is heading, I suspect we'll start doing this to ourselves to secure sales and protect IP.

--

[0] - The Expeditionary Force book series.

Could this also give unions control over what tools are approved for use on specific jobs or in specific regions? Or be used to detect when a union worker is doing a job they are not allowed to do? This is a thing. I had to "look the other way" when a person was sanding some wood, as if I cared. There was a specific union that was supposed to do the sanding and this was preventing the framer from completing their job.

The number of people who just take state regulatory enforcement action as something that's good by default is much larger than the number of people who give unions the same benefit of the doubt so we'll probably see geofencing tied to professional licenses at the state level before we see it on the facility/jobsite level and tied to unions.

Large equipment in industries that can afford it is already activated by employee badge for QC and employee tracking purposes so what you're describing already exists in some settings.

> Higher torque settings or speeds could be unlockable features.

Diabolical. “Scan this QR code to watch an ad and unlock 30 minutes of 3x speed!”

"please submit proof of your <trade> license on our website to unlock this feature"

Can't have scabs who aren't several years invested in the system doing work. (i'd /s it but the people who push these things will unironically say stuff like that).

> I can see the totalitarian-minded mining this for a revenue opportunity to create an exciting new era of subscription-based power tools.

Think bigger. Power tools that phone home describing their use and location, all tied to an individual via credit-card checkout (or face recognition) and/or warranty sign-up.

It's probably best to think of the modern world as being constructed with the substrate of a Las Vegas casino.