These all belong to a family of devices on the drawing board at places like IBM, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Some are in advanced stages of prototyping. They include such things as microchips farmers till into the soil to measure moisture and acidity; building materials that adjust resistance to wind and earthquake; insulation that changes according to weather conditions. The idea is simple: computing must become ubiquitous, pervasive. And nowhere will it be more pervasive than when it is closest to us. As Michael Hawley put it in the mission statement for his Things That Think project at the MIT Media Lab, “We wear clothes, put on jewelry, sit on chairs and walk on carpets that all share the same profound failing: they are blind, deaf and very dumb. Cuff links don’t, in fact, link with anything else… Glasses help sight, but they don’t see.”
They will if the engineers have their way. Eyeglasses are the medium of choice for an idea variously called BodyNet and the Personal Area Network, or PAN. You would wear glasses with a camera in the frame, a photodiode sensor to monitor your eye movements, a voice transmitter in the earpiece and a short-range radio connection to a pagerlike device worn on a belt or in a handbag. That device would contain whole libraries of personal information, about both you and everyone you’ve ever met while wearing the BodyNet.
One effect would be to displace at a smaller size the multiple electronic devices we carry today, such as laptops, mobile phones and personal digital assistants. But BodyNet goes further. Thus equipped, you could be prompted with the name and business of an acquaintance approaching on the street. (The device would compare the image with its database, and your glasses would whisper the result in your ear.) You could, with the help of a phased array of microphones embedded in the fabric of your jacket–what Hawley calls “underware”– respond knowingly to conversations: if your acquaintance mentions an investment opportunity, your device could connect to the Internet and call up all relevant information about the company in question, using your glasses as a display screen. Dinner parties would never be the same.
Sound good? It certainly does to the digerati. They are prone to such statements as “If computers are everywhere, they better stay out of the way” (Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, senior scientists at Xerox PARC), and “The idea is nothing less than to make the world itself programmable” (Alan Daniels, then of Georgia Tech).
In their view, computing will, by the year 2005, shift decisively from domination by the personal computer to reliance on a variety of “information appliances.” At first most of these devices will be handheld: Web-ready telephones and palmtops, for example. Increasingly, though, they will be embedded in the background in ways almost invisible to us. Wearable computers will arrive soon after, though it will take some time to make them small and light enough to actually embed them in clothing. Cameras will be everywhere, feeding visual data to the Internet, and some researchers believe that by 2020 we will be on camera nearly nonstop.
The world of ubiquitous computing raises a number of questions. High among them is the issue of inescapability. “In practice,” says Ann Livermore, president of enterprise computing at Hewlett-Packard, “the slogan ‘Any time, anywhere’ means ‘All the time, everywhere’.” Even greater, though, is the problem of privacy, when pervasive in fact means invasive. There is no precedent for the idea of self-executing devices that are ubiquitous, networked and always on. If your car knows when you’re intoxicated, why can’t it also inform a police car? If a communicating pacemaker can tell your doctor that you’re on the verge of a cardiac event, why can’t it also tell your insurance company?
All such devices will, of course, be presented as having benefits so obvious as to pre-empt objection. It’s hard to quarrel with a car that deters drunk driving, even at the cost of a little self-incrimination. It’s even harder to argue against a networked pacemaker, if it saves lives. But, says Coralee Whitcomb, president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, it never stops there: “All these things develop other uses… Any time you create a technology that is inherently invasive, it’ll get used that way. And there’s always a million good reasons for it.”
Technologists do expect resistance to such devices, at least at first. “We are naturally squeamish about ideas like electronics that are worn, ingested, implanted,” says Hawley. “Maybe it’s rooted in our deep fear [of] being eaten, or disgust at being the host for a parasite. But once we cross these bridges they seem to become second nature.” Health care is only the most immediate use of ubiquitous computing, he says. He envisions a world in which the ability to put entire systems on a single chip, creating such devices as voice-activated “metaphones” the size of a lapel pin, effectively abolishes distance as a barrier to human interaction.
Some high hurdles remain. Power supplies must be miniaturized. Current network-management tools are wholly inadequate to ubiquitous computing. Nor will there be enough network capacity for another 10 years. But these are susceptible to engineering attack. The same might be said of privacy: protection will come from some combination of encryption and digital fingerprinting, in which people who gain access to your personal data leave electronic traces of their presence, allowing you to hold them accountable. These technical fixes aren’t durable, though. As David Brin, a scientist and author of “The Transparent Society,” notes, “Each year’s ‘unbreakable’ encryption standard is broken within less than three years by groups of amateurs.” A new and stronger standard then emerges, only to be itself broken, in a permanent game of digital leapfrog.
In any case, privacy is not just a condition. It’s also a state of mind, a feeling of security that owes more to the possibility of anonymity than anything else. And anonymity is one thing that the next wave of computing will abolish.
