The transition to intelligent furniture will also involve a reconsideration of the hierarchy of furniture. For example, the tables throughout your house exist in a functional ranking system. Today the king of tables, of course, is the dining room table. You spend more money on it than other tables, such as bedroom nightstands, the coffee table, the patio table base , the workbench in the garage, the desk in your home office and so on. Its quality, appearance and placement are far more important than that of lesser tables.

When the dust settles on the transition to intelligent furniture, however, it's likely that the lowly coffee table base will usurp the crown and become the most important (and expensive) table in your house. The reason is that the current location and purpose of a coffee table as a table are peripheral to what's important about your family's life. But the intelligent coffee table of the future may be the central computing device in your home.