John’s vision 8
EXTRACT: SMARTNESS
(…)
I often wish I were a penguin when contemplating the Honeywell Chromotherm III central heating controller that sits on the wall of my home in Amsterdam. This little box is covered with arrows and buttons and words and—of course—a digital display. It was designed to look technical and smart, and I don’t doubt that somewhere inside its little head thoughts, of a kind, are clattering around. But the Chromo’s interface is, to me at least, incomprehensible, and the fifty-page instruction manual long ago disappeared. So it leads a life of its own. And a profligate life it is: The central heating system it “controls” is ruinously inefficient. My house is heated uniformly from top to bottom throughout the days and evenings—whether or not at I am at home or even in the country. A thermal-engineering acquaintance reckons that my domestic energy performance is ten thousand times less efficient than the penguin’s.
How smart is that? I’m the most advanced mammal on the planet, and my Chromotherm is supposed to be a smart product—but the penguin is just a dumb bird. It doesn’t add up. And if it doesn’t add up now, how much worse will things get when my Chromotherm’s children and grandchildren, swarms of smart devices and pervasive computing and “ambient intelligence,” turn up?
Ubiquitous computing spreads the appearance of intelligence and connectivity to more or less everything. Whether all these chips will make for a better product—let alone a better life—is a moot point. Not long ago, I borrowed a car in which was installed a high-end Pioneer car radio. I want to share with you a summary of the specification that appears in the owner’s manual (see box 9.1). I felt as if I had an “auto-flap motorized face” myself by the time I’d struggled through this list, only to find that one piece of high-tech wizardry was missing: an on-off switch! As a result, I did the entire journey without music.
They call this phenomenon “feature drift” in consumer electronics—the engineering equivalent of playing with your food. And it’s beginning to hurt a lot of companies, because a gap is opening up between the functionality of technology, on the one hand, and the perceived value of that technology to the people who are supposed to buy it, on the other. I have enshrined this tendency in two design laws, the first of which I have taken the liberty of naming after myself. Thackara’s law states:
If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product.
Thackara’s law has a daughter, the law of diminishing amazement (LODA). LODA states that the more fancy tech you pack into a product, the harder it becomes to impress people with its benefits. I invented LODA after someone drove me across Germany in a brand-new top-of-the-range Mercedes. This mobile temple to technology had everything: remote keyless entry, full power train control, aircraft-like instrument clusters, adaptive suspension, theft-deterrent systems, crash sensors, diagnostics, traction control, seat memory (in five directions), satellite-based navigation, vehicle radar, intelligent cruise control. It was fun, I have to admit, being driven down an autobahn in the big Benz at 150 miles an hour—but the litany of gadgets recited by the proud owner left me cold. I felt: “So?” My nonamazement must have been a disappointment to my host, who had paid two hundred thousand dollars for the car—never mind to the brilliant engineers at Benz who sweated blood getting all this stuff to work.
BOX
Feature Drift: Car Radios
Supertuner III TM with RDS (Radio Data System); 24-Station, 6-Button (18FM/6AM) Presets; BSM (Best Stations Memory); AGC (Automatic Gain Control); Optimum CD Tracking Performance; Playback Compatible with Digital Audio CD-R; IP (Interactive Pioneer) Bus System Control; Multi-CD Player; Component Single CD or MD Players; Voice Commander (CD-VC50 & CD-VC60); TV Tuner (GEX-P7000TV); Disc Title Memory; 10-Character Display for Disc Title; Memory, CD Text (SCD & MCD) & NMD Title (With Scroll); Disc List; MOSFET45 (45W × 4-Channel High Power); HiVolt RCA PreOuts (×3 Pair); Two-Way Crossover (HPF and LPF); Front/Rear HPF; Sub-Out LBF; Sub-Out Level and Phase Control; EEQ Performance Chip; 3-Band Performance Equalizer; Easy EQ (EEQ) Switches; I-User EQ Presets (SuperBass, Powerful, Natural, Vocal, Flat, Custom); Source Custom EQ Memory; Selectable Loudness Control (Low, Mid, High, Off); Selectable FIE (Front Image Enhancer);Rear LPF; Auto-Flap Motorized Face; Detachable Face Security; DFS Alarm; Wireless Full-Function Smart Remote Control with Mounting Base; Cellular/Navigation Mute; Multi-Color Organic EL Display; Full-Motion Animated 3D Graphics; High Resolution Display (256 × 52 Pixels); High Resolution Display; Super Bright (60 Candela) with Wide Viewing Angle (170 Degrees); Level Indicator.
When not hurtling down autobahnen, we also hear a lot in Europe about wired domestic appliances. But I can’t say the prospect fills me with joy. Ericsson and Electrolux (among others) are developing a refrigerator that will sense when it is low on milk and order more direct from the supplier. Direct from the cow for all I know. I can just see it. I’ll be driving home from work, and the phone will ring. “Your refrigerator is on the line,” the car will say; “it wants you to pick up some milk on your way home.” To which my response will be: “Tell the refrigerator I’m in a meeting.”
Most of us think about technology in much the same way that a frog thinks about boiling water. The story goes that if you drop a frog into a pan when the water is boiling, it will leap out; but if you put the frog into a pan of cold water, and then heat it steadily toward the boiling point, the frog—unaware that any dramatic change is taking place—will just sit there and slowly cook. So, is technology cooking us? Many hard objects around us are certainly beginning to “soften.” In New York, Tokyo, or London, right now, we encounter an embedded system on average 150 times a day. The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-vending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics.
Embedded—but Not Asleep
The disappearance of computing is a bad reason to stop thinking about it. If citizens do not set the agenda for its use, others will. The most energetic developers of new applications for pervasive computing right now are logistics industries, as we saw in chapter 3, and security and police interests. When the computing industry started pushing pervasive computing hard in the late 1990s, it often used “House of the Future” mock-ups to showcase potential applications and attract the attention of potential funders. These mock-ups usually featured (and still do) lots of voice-controlled and touch screens. Microsoft’s Easy Living project focused on the software technologies needed to create a smart home environment, such as software agents, computer vision, and machine learning.
But in the aftermath of 9/11, attention switched en masse from home to homeland security (HS). Reliable figures for the total public and private expenditures on HS technologies are hard to find, but estimates are that total HS outlays—by federal, state, local, and private entities in the United States—grew from $5 billion in 2000 to $85 billion in 2004, with a forecast that they will grow to $130 billion—and possibly as high as $210 billion—by 2010.
Are disappearing computers a menace? Think about that frog again. How does his behavior compare with our own relationship to technology? I’d say that like the frog, we have a vague sensation that “things seem to be getting warmer around here”—but for most of us, the condition of “getting warmer and less comfortable” has been a constant throughout our lives. We’re used to it. It’s not so much that technology is changing quickly; change is one of the constants we have become used to. And it’s not that technology is penetrating every aspect of our lives; that, too, has been happening to all of us since we were born. The shocking thing to me, at least, is the rate of acceleration of change—right now. As I described in chapter 2, the accelerometer has disappeared off the right-hand side of the dial.
And critical reflection on this new wave of technology is in short supply. And yet, in the domain of policing and law enforcement, a whole new industry has emerged called digital ID. It already has its own conference and trade show, Digital ID World, which specializes in “the identity management space.” The world’s largest smart-card rollout has already started in China; all Chinese over the age of sixteen are being issued a smart card as an identification document. The rollout of these chip-bearing cards to 1.3 billion citizens is expected to be completed by the year 2008, according to the official news agency Xinhua. Surveillance is permeating our environments. As the writer Mike Davis puts it, “Tall buildings are becoming increasingly sentient and packed with firepower. The sensory system of the average office tower already includes panoptic vision, smell, sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection, and, in some cases, hearing. Some architects predict the day when the building’s own AI security computer will be able automatically to screen and identify its human population and even, perhaps, respond to their emotional states (fear, panic, etc.).”
AmI?
The mission for ambient intelligence (AmI), as expressed by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies Advisory Group (ISTAG), sounds innocuous enough: “See how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, leading to new ways of supporting and enhancing people’s lives.” In the ambient intelligent environment (which in the United States tends to be called “ubiquitous computing” or “pervasive computing”) envisaged by its promoters, human beings will be surrounded by computing and networking technology embedded in everyday objects. Furniture, clothes, vehicles, roads, and smart materials—even particles of decorative substances, like paint—will merge in, as ISTAG puts it, a “seamless environment of computing, advanced networking technology and specific interfaces.” Technology will be embedded, personalized, adaptive, and anticipatory. All of which sounds fine and dandy, except that all these promises are based on wildly implausible assumptions. No technology delivered by competing private companies will ever be “seamlessly” integrated. No foreseeable software will be able to “respond intelligently to spoken or gestured indications of desire,” as ISTAG asserts. A visit to Greece in the summer of 2003, for the “Tales of the Disappearing Computer” conference, amplified my feelings of unease. It’s not so much that bad men in black hats are plotting dastardly deeds—more that enthusiastic researchers are failing to think at all about possible downsides to their inventions.
Many of the policymakers, engineers, designers, and companies now promoting pervasive computing speak as if the natural world and its inhabitants—you and I—simply did not exist. The inaugural issue of Pervasive Computing is not untypical: “Our world is like the American West … a rich, open space where the rules have yet to be written and the borders to be drawn.” Think about the last part of that statement. In the brave new world of pervasive computing, people everywhere are reduced to the status of native American Indians—and we know what happened to them.
Pervasive computing technologies promise to transform the ways we experience and live in the world. But did anyone ask our permission to “produce answers before they are required”? Have we debated the consequences of proactive computing? No, we have not. In its Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010, the European Union is not much more thoughtful. This key document outlines a vision of “convergence” as a point at which “the human is surrounded by computing and advanced networking technology which is aware of his presence, his personality, his needs—and is capable of responding intelligently to spoken or gestured indications of desire, and even in engaging in intelligent dialogue.” The AmI landscape, as it’s known in Euro-speak, is embedded, personalized, adaptive, and anticipatory. It provides “an evolutionary path from current modes of human behaviour to new behaviours that benefit from AmI enhancement.” The dominant mode of communication is laid-back, rather than lean-forward, concludes the document, with great confidence.
The problem with these visions is that they are based on one implausible assumption and one plain wrong assumption. The implausible assumption is that all people, and all systems, will perform optimally at all times. No technology has ever done that, and none ever will. Even if 99.9 percent of the smart tags, sensors, smart materials, connected appliances, wearable computing, and (soon) implants that are now being unleashed upon the world work as instructed—what about the millions that, inevitably, will fail, or run amok? As my water-filled bag testifies, when human beings issue instructions to devices, the results are not always benign.
The plain-wrong assumption is that we know what the consequences of these new technologies will be. We know, for a fact, that technology always has unexpected as well as expected consequences.
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