Spafford (2004), touches on the various challenges that will be faced in regards to the technology convergence.  The idea that the continuous merging of various technologies brings forward many positive perspectives and attributes to our interaction with these 'black boxes', however without careful consideration of what affect this will have on the future of our society and future technologies and products.
The main challenges that Spafford touches on include;

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  Data Integrity

The idea that if data is corrupted in some potential applications, the resulting outcome could give a new meaning to the word disastrous.  Some technologies and devices simply do not carry the required level of capacity.

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  Availability

The systems managing many of these applications will need to have high availability to ensure that a process is not interrupted.  In many devices there are various wait times for different component and the availability and timeframe in which these are required could restrict the success of many products.

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  Security

Some technologies must have security both during creation and production use. For that matter, the manufacturing centers need significant logical and physical safeguards at all times.  Not only do some centers not have this security but do not safeguard at all, exposing various security risks to themselves and users.

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  Complexity

As complexity increases, the likelihood of one or more errors increases. With generations not being able to keep up and adapt to the ever changing technological world, complex devices may simply fail in the marketplace.

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  Human Error

Related to complexity, the odds of human error in these systems are very high. As devices becomes more and more complex and the ‘black boxes’ integrate more and more uses, this rises even higher.

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  Law of Unintended Consequences

All too often, people plan for expected outcomes and find themselves facing unintended consequences. Essentially, this is stating that many applications have outcomes either in place of or in addition to what was planned.  This can also be a result of human error and complexity.

References

Spafford, G 2004, Surving the Great Technology Convergence, Datamation, accessed 21/09/2010, http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/3400321/Surviving-the-Great-Technology-Convergence.htm