Huge article in NYT Sunday Magazine, Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age. To big to post here but here is the link for those interested.
nytimes.com
OK I won't be lazy, I'll post it. But it's big and will have a sequel. You have been warned!!!
April 22, 2001
Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age
By JAMES GLEICK
As I drive my rental car across Silicon
Valley under a cloudless and starry sky,
it is fitting that the electronic navigation device
on the dashboard should be talking to me.
"Approaching left turn," says Helga (as I call
her). "Left turn in point five miles." Headlights
rush past us, exit signs loom and are gone, and
now it occurs to me that this freeway doesn't
even have left turns. Helga is trying to show
me something on a tiny, color-coded,
icon-studded moving-map display at the edge
of my peripheral vision. Up in the real world,
we hurtle under an overpass. That wasn't my
left turn, I hope. But yes, apparently Helga
lacks perfect knowledge of California
cloverleaf topography. "Calculating route," she
chirps, as if we can simply begin again with no
memory of the past. I am mindful of the
German motorist who drove his BMW into the
Havel River one night because he put too
much trust in his dashboard navigator.
Still, we can't get lost. We are too well
connected, Helga and I. She listens constantly
to at least four of the two dozen satellites of
the Global Positioning System: orbiting atomic
clocks that bathe the globe in their precisely
intermingled time signals, enabling any device
skilled in trigonometry (and these days what
device isn't?) to reckon its exact location. We
are not alone here. My cellular phone, as long
as it is on, parleys silently with the network,
giving and receiving information about when
and where we are. My hand-held Palm-type
computer cum wireless modem has already
pulled in directions by e-mail and can download
new maps in real time. I could plug my laptop
computer into the cell phone, or vice versa, and
be online that way. (I haven't felt the need to
give all these devices names; most of them
aren't talking to me.)
The network knows where we are. The
network is there, all around us, a ghostly
electromagnetic presence, pervasive and
salient, a global infrastructure taking shape
many times faster than the Interstate highway
or the world's railroads. This is different from
the radio-spectrum Babel that defined the 20th
century: the broadcast era. We aren't expected
merely to tune in and listen. This network is
push and pull, give and take. It broadens our
reach. If we lock our keys in the car, the
network can unlock it for us from thousands of
miles away -- just a few bytes through the
ether.
To play in this game, we must equip ourselves
with gadgets. Communicative gadgets: mobile
phones, pocket computers, radio-synchronizing
wristwatches, remote car keys, smart cards
and smart tags, microchips and antennas sewn
into our hems and lapels. Two thousand one is
shaping up to be the year of the wireless
device -- the threshold year -- just as 1994 was the year of the Internet and 1987 the
year of the fax machine. Never mind the dismal sounds from Wall Street; the share
prices of Palm and Nokia are not leading indicators on this matter. Mobile phones are
nearing ubiquity: teenagers depend on them and frenetically instant-message their pals;
couples stroll together engaged in parallel telecommunication; the New
York/Washington shuttle before departure is one big tubular telephone lounge. But the
phone is just the obvious part. I.B.M. is preparing Digital Jewelry: earrings, bracelets,
chokers, microphones, cameras, tiny brains, all with minuscule batteries, all
communicating wirelessly. We are to lodge these items nightly in their Digital Jewelry
Box, where they will recharge their spirits and swap data. We children go to sleep;
our toys stay up and play.
So the editors have sent me forth, equipped. I have joined what the Japanese are
calling the oyayubizoku (the thumb tribe), named for the organ we so compulsively
poke at our tiny keypads. I am meant to be the Compleat Geek. My hip vibrates with
each incoming e-mail message because of the BlackBerry two-way pager clipped
there, just like Al Gore's. I have the i-O Display Systems i-glasses, pixels glistening
before my eyeballs, one step short of pumping virtual reality directly into my optic
nerve. I feel reluctant to wear this item -- so sleek and cumbersome, so
fashion-forward and yet so retro -- out in Times Square. I share my misgivings with
the editors. Their reply comes by e-mail: "We advise you to look at the fine print in
your contract, which specifically addresses the type of headgear we can force you to
wear in public."
Oh, fine. I'm connected.
nformation everywhere, at light speed, immersing us -- is this what we want? We
seem unsure. We are the species that defines itself in terms of information: homo
sapiens sapiens. We are knowledge connoisseurs. We are being promised some
approximation of All Previous Text (and music and pictures) in our pockets. Then
again, we didn't evolve in a world with so much data and buzz. Our sense organs
tuned into one slow channel at a time. Now we tune in and out. The dream of perfect
ceaseless information flow can slip so easily into a nightmare of perfect perpetual
distraction.
Our technologies don't just empower us: they also harass us, and they change us -- for
better and for worse. None more than the computer. "Other inventions alter the
conditions of human existence," writes Richard Powers in his new novel, "Plowing the
Dark." "The computer alters the human. It's our complement, our partner, our
vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new
home." All the more so when the computer is . . . everywhere.
But a long and bumpy path lies between promise and reality. "Wireless" is still a
relative term. The cable and plug industry need not panic. Heading out to Silicon
Valley with my wireless devices, I find myself gathering the following accessories:
1. For my laptop, a three-pin AC adapter plus power cord.
2. For my cell phone, a power cord, plus a cable to the laptop. Plus a hands-free
headset -- earplug and microphone in one -- so I can walk along giving the impression
that I'm talking to myself. I do not yet have a wearable cellular phone armband, rapid
charger kit, holster or leather case.
3. For my hand-held PC, a docking cradle. A power cord and adapter. And a
detachable cable for synchronizing the data in the hand-held with another PC. The
hand-held also has a modem attachment, which has its own power cord.
4. For my digital-music player, I have plug-type earphones, although my
otorhinolaryngologist disapproves of the attempt to apply sound right to the eardrum.
Another cable connects the music player to my laptop, for loading the music in the
first place.
5. A different (but indistinguishable) cable connects my digital camera to the laptop,
for unloading the pictures. My digital voice recorder, too, has a unique cable. No
power cord; it runs on AAA batteries.
6. Batteries.
7. Manuals and warning placards. "To satisfy F.C.C. RF exposure compliance
requirements," says one, "the user should generally maintain a separation distance of 4
cm between the person's body and the device and its antenna." But relax, we can
make an exception for hands, "because they are extremities."
There are old-style connectors: serial ports, with 9 pins or 25. There are new-style
connectors: USB and FireWire. I try to coil some of the wires. They came with twist
ties for this purpose. If I were better organized, I would have a box just for the twist
ties. Another for the belt clips. My wife watches dolefully: "You're setting up the Mir
space station?"
In the imaginations of the gadget makers, these cables have already vanished. A new
wireless standard called Bluetooth (after Harald Bluetooth, first-millennium Viking
king) is meant to replace them. Every gadget gets a Bluetooth chip, with its own radio
transceiver. All these Bluetooth-enabled devices sense one another's presence, trade
stories and keep one another up to date. They create spontaneous personal networks,
where devices can act simultaneously as master and slave to other devices: ad hoc
"scatternets," "personal area networks," networks within networks. Your Bluetooth
mobile phone may obey instructions from a concert hall to switch to vibrate-only
mode. Your Bluetooth headset will presumably know, at any given moment, whether
to keep playing some song you have downloaded or switch to an incoming phone call
or alert you to an impending thunderstorm.
Into the same virtual space, the electromagnetic spectrum, comes a wholly different
wireless standard, called 802.11b. (Say "eight oh two dot eleven bee.") The
proponents of this standard are pushing a friendlier name, Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity.
Apple wires all its new laptops for 802.11b, and other manufacturers are following
suit. If you install a small base station somewhere on your home network, you can
carry laptops from room to room, basement to kitchen counter, and never go off line.
By the end of this year, thousands of hotels, airport lounges and coffee shops will be
filling their airspace with this same invisible radiation field: information and
connectivity all around. Microsoft and Starbucks are teaming up to deploy it. One can
imagine grocery stores and department stores beaming real-time information to their
gadget-toting customers. One can even imagine properly functional motor-vehicles
offices and polling places.
Wi-Fi is "the next big thing," asserts J. William Gurley, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture
capitalist and online columnist. "The history of technology has proven again and again
that if a certain open architecture gains escape velocity, there is no turning back."
He's right. Whether he's right specifically about 802.11b doesn't matter. It might be
Wi-Fi, or it might be Bluetooth, or it might be a combination of those and something
else besides.
Stock-market watchers have their own special perspective, of course, and lately they
have been glum. Yet people in the world's Silicon Valleys are still showing up for
work and planning our future. The recent spells of market euphoria and market
despair, at their most extreme, have been illusions, with little relation to the real
breadth of technological change. We do tend to take our illusions seriously when they
involve large sums of money. For that matter, the rising volatility on Wall Street flows
directly from the dense, high-velocity interconnectedness of our information sources.
When everyone hears the same "news" at the same time and everyone tries to buy or
sell the same stocks, any hope of market equilibrium vanishes. We are learning to live
with whole new species of mass hysteria.
In other ways, too, these developments pose challenges to the life of the polity. More
than ever, our ability to participate in the basic processes of our information-rich
culture -- commerce, education, entertainment -- will depend on technology. The
Internet has been a democratizing force worldwide, knocking down walls, creating
new voices, redistributing knowledge -- sometimes, redistributing the kind of
knowledge that brings wealth. But there are barriers to entry. Like our other core
infrastructures -- roads and bridges, the electric power grid, the phone system -- the
wired and wireless network is being built out largely by private companies, yet the
public needs universal access. If laptops and Internet connections and Web-aware
mobile phones remain tokens of privilege, then the gap between rich and poor will
grow. Digital Jewelry, indeed.
he Lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary have an open file on the
word "network." Some of the file is virtual: bits living in the network. Some of it
exists in more traditional, detached form, on 4-by-6-inch slips of paper, which, at
the moment I inquire, happen to be out on someone's desk. I'm wondering whether
they have tracked this new sense of the word: "the network," or even "the Network,"
meaning a global entity, bigger than the Internet. The totality of the world's computers,
databases and communications channels. Maybe the network can be said to possess
knowledge and even behaviors.
Sure enough, they are keeping an eye on "the network." "It would seem that the new
sense you mention is closely -- maybe inextricably -- tied up with a usage which goes
back well before the Internet came into existence," says Peter Gilliver, an O.E.D.
associate editor. Not the original sense, of course ("work in which threads, wires or
similar materials are arranged in the fashion of a net"), but something connoting the
totality of all information networks -- and something we tend to personify ("the
network listens"; "the network knows"). Gilliver checks science and science fiction
without prejudice. "As long ago as 1970," he notes, "the network was clearly used in
very much your sense, the only difference being that in 1970 that 'totality' was pretty
limited."
They might also want to take a new look at the word "pervasive." I'm hearing it all
over Silicon Valley, and without the usual pejorative overtones. Pervasive computing is
both a buzzword and a new field of study within computer science. It means
computers in the walls, in tables and chairs, in your clothing. Computers in the air,
when engineers can figure that one out. (A group at Berkeley is working on "Smart
Dust," financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) Computers
fading into the environment.
Computer scientists, embracing this vision, see their discipline as a new branch of
social science. They look back over their shoulders at the humans in the picture, and
sometimes they sound surprised. "Individuals within the space are doing things other
than interacting with the computer," declares a recent research report, "coming and
going, and perhaps most strikingly, interacting with each other -- not just with the
computer."
Pervasive Computing is also a new division and "strategic initiative" at I.B.M.,
spreading across several of the company's headquarters and research laboratories.
Helga has guided me past San Jose, around some hills and dales, to the astoundingly
bucolic Almaden Research Center, about 700 scientists in four hypermodern buildings
hidden in a field dotted with cows. I head for the User Lab, the place where they are
supposedly thinking about us humans and where we fit in. The head of the User Lab
is Daniel M. Russell, a lanky, mischievous-looking man with a trim white beard.
He begins by announcing, "I fundamentally don't care about computers." But he led
computer-research groups at Apple and at Xerox, and he has computers on the desk
and computers on the wall, and as his staff members wander in and out, they pretty
much all have computers in their pockets, and even that skateboard in the corner
happens to be a computer on wheels, so clearly there's some kind of subtle distinction
coming.
"I care about comput ing," Russell says. "I care about what you can do with this
thing, this magical property, this thing we've imbued into our devices. This lab is about
computing as a medium for people, a medium of expression and a medium for work
and so on."
He has cognitive psychologists, mechanical engineers and industrial designers. He has
a working machine shop. All around are bits of gadgeteer detritus: broken-up pagers
and wristwatches, eyeglass frames and limbs from department-store mannequins.
"One of the pieces of what we're doing is thinking about how can we make devices
smaller and smaller and smaller," he says. "You can imagine where all this leads,
right? The obvious terminal point is you implant them, which brings up its own set of
issues." (The jokes about our bionic and cyborg future fly freely around here.) "Or you
turn it into jewelry." Left earring talks wirelessly to right earring. Pendants become
annunciators; rings become pointing devices or alarms.
"I want my ring to shine red when my daughter gets home," Russell says. "Or flash
green when I have an urgent message. Or the stock price shoots above 200. So now
the question becomes: Once you've got rings that talk to your computer and cell
phones that are in your ears, how do you get them to work together? How do you dial
someone?"
Cameron Miner runs the group's design lab for working on such questions. "We're
seeing a usability gap emerge with these devices," he says -- devices constantly
shrinking while adding new functions. "My eyes are not getting any better. My fingers
are not getting any smaller."
Tiny keyboards are just frustrating. Voice recognition is everyone's dream, but
understanding human speech is one of those fundamental capabilities that continue to
elude machines. It's a hard problem.
These researchers share certain articles of faith, though. One is that their world
marches to the steadfast drumbeat of Moore's Law. However tiny and however
powerful this year's devices are, next year's will be tinier and more powerful. They
can bank on it. So they're planning ahead. They also believe that no matter how
Luddite we feel, deep down we are data addicts, suckers for information. Resistance
is futile. With all the stuff being thrown against our walls, some of it has to stick.
It may as well be a law of modern life. Once it was true of machines, as they began
infiltrating the fabric of our existence, and now it is particularly true of the
technologies of computing and communication. First we disdain them and despise
them; then we depend on them. In between, we hardly notice a transition.
Our first wearable information appliance established itself long ago. The wristwatch
industry has never been healthier, though some stalwart souls still affect not to wear
such a thing. "We find that people look at their watches four dozen times a day,"
Miner says. "And at no time do you realize that more than when you forget your
watch. It's not just that you don't know what time it is; you feel all out of sorts. The
rhythm of your day is all thrown off.
"So we're thinking, What other kinds of information can you push into that peripheral
channel? Contacts and schedules and things like that are good. But what about your
stock-market portfolio? Or biometric information about your loved ones, so you can
see how your parents are doing, just to know whether they're having a good day or a
bad day."
We wear other devices too. We have cheerfully sported lenses in front of our eyes for
several hundred years. They could be smarter. Russell has prototype eyeglasses that
translate signs from Japanese into English, displaying the translation as a caption a
half-inch from your retina. Now, translation is another of those hard
artificial-intelligence problems, but still. "Even if the translation is terrible," Russell
says, "I don't read any Japanese at all, so for me, this is a lot better than that."
Pervasive computing isn't just about gadgets to carry and wear, though. These
researchers are thinking about our whole environment. They have rooms that use tiny
cameras to watch people's eyes and keep track of what we're looking at. They are
conducting studies of how we behave, and how we feel about it, when we can glance
at an appliance and say, "Turn it on." They assume that entire houses will be
ensembles of hidden computers.
The head of I.B.M. Pervasive Computing is Michel Mayer, a product of the École
Supérieure d'Électricité in Paris and a company veteran. "It's going to be more and
more machines talking to machines, things talking to things, without human
interaction," he says. "We're already there. The infrastructure, although it's boring and
more remote and in the background, is increasingly important. It's going to be your
fridge, your car, your tools, your clothes, doing all those little microelements of tasks.
It's going to be your dishwasher negotiating with your utility company over what the
best rate is and when."
The average American house already contains more than 40 computers embedded in
various items. A typical electric toothbrush runs on about 3,000 lines of code. Last
year alone, eight billion new microprocessors came into the world. "These are mostly
brain dead right now," Russell says. "They're tiny, four-bit processors and so on. But
you know where our world is going."
Even here, in this bastion of cheery futurism, they don't assume this is unalloyed good
news. Science-fiction writers have been warning for years about this sort of world,
painting scary pictures of a human race dependent on technology that runs amok or
just breaks down.
"Well, yeah!" Russell says. "We read that stuff, too! How many times has your cell
phone crashed on you? Mine crashed last night. When your house crashes, how do
you restart your house?" This question doesn't have a good answer, although with
smaller gadgets we have learned to find the reset button or yank the batteries to cycle
the power. And pray it won't be necessary to phone for technical support.
With new possibilities come new anxieties. How much smarter do you want your
house to be, when you still haven't mastered setting the time on your VCR, your stove
and your coffee maker? Then, if the devices learn to reset their own clocks remotely,
will you trust them? One central modern fear is that as machines grow too complex to
understand and repair easily, we grow helplessly reliant on them. We become their
slaves. This was the main argument of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, but that
doesn't mean it is completely insane.
It is certainly time to worry about privacy and personal autonomy. If your truck is
G.P.S.-equipped or your car has an electronic toll-paying tag, the network is already
capable of keeping track of your whereabouts, so you may not care to implant a
tracking chip under your skin. But you could. Your employer may already be testing
electronic tags and badges for this purpose.
And every new channel of information is a potential intruder with a sales pitch. Maybe
we have become used to advertisements next to magazine articles. Maybe we can
even handle billboards in public airspace, and commercials at movie theaters where
we've paid for seats, and telephone promotion from companies keeping us on hold. It's
going to get worse, quickly. You will soon notice lots of little screens beaming
messages at you. On airplane seat backs: Improved Data Speed!!! . . . Turn Your
E-Mail Into Voice Mail . . . Nasdaq /31.38 . . . Real-Time Stock Quotes . . . Was
Weather Something You Planned For? Select Weather Channel. . . .
"When displays become essentially free, they're all going to be subject to sale," Russell
says. "I have a little display in my home thermostat. Believe me, the thermostat
company's going to want to put in animated graphics, and if they can possibly sell that
space to the heating-oil company, they'll do it. So one of the questions about ubiquitous
technology becomes: Who owns your attention? Who owns the right to push inside
your personal environment? When you walk past a store, your cell phone could say:
'Come in! Ten percent off!' How do you screen that stuff? How do you
anti-spam-filter your life?"
he Pervasive-Computing people are breaking the computer apart. Every
function -- speak, locate, photograph, read, remember -- can be detached. They
think of it as the constellation model of computing. Your devices form a
constellation. They all talk together, and they don't need much transmission power
because they only have to cover the distance from ear to pocket, say. Displays,
processors, memory and power can all be separated. It is efficient. We already carry
amazing amounts of spare processing power, in our cell phones if nowhere else.
Turbulent crosscurrents here. We see the computer splitting into its constituent parts,
which can float more or less freely. At the same time, we see all the different
components combining and recombining. Combo digital camera and digital music
players are hitting the market. A cell phone available in Hong Kong doubles as an
ovulation clock and calorie counter. A Global Positioning System chip can meld with
almost anything. The building blocks of electronic life are suddenly . . . building
blocks, and manufacturers want to try one permutation after another. We consumers,
meanwhile, exhibit signs of craving the single perfect gadget, the Swiss Army knife of
digital devices. So which will it be? Free-floating specialization or all-functions-in-one? |
