Interactions - July/August 2009

Beyond that, one of the places where shallowly Weiserian logic breaks down is in thinking that the platforms we use now disappear from the world just because ubiquitous computing has arrived. We’ve still got radio, for example—OK, now it’s satellite radio and streaming Internet feeds—but the interaction metaphor isn’t any different. By the same token, we’re still going to be using reasonably convention-al-looking laptops and desktop keyboard/display combos for a while yet. The form factor is pretty well optimized for the delivery of a certain class of services. It’s a convenient and well-assimilated interaction vocabulary; none of that’s going away just yet. And the same goes for billboards and TV screens.

But all of those things become entirely different propositions in the everyware world: more open, more modular, ever more conceived of as network resources with particular input and output affordances. We already see some signs of this with Microsoft’s recent “Social Desktop” prototype—which, mind you, is a very bad idea as it currently stands, especially as implemented on something with the kind of security record that Windows enjoys—and we’ll be seeing many more.

If every display in the world has an IP address and a self-descriptor indicating what kind of protocols it’s capable of handling, then you begin to get into some really interesting and thorny territory. The first things to go away, off the top of my head, are screens for a certain class of mobile device—why power a screen off your battery when you can push the data to a nearby

display that’s much bigger, much brighter, much more social—and conventional projectors.

Then we get into some very interesting issues around large, public interactive displays—who “drives” the display, and so forth. But here again, we’ll have to fight to keep these things sane. It’s past time for a public debate around these issues, because they’re unquestionably going to condition the everyday experience of walking down the street in most of our cities. And that’s difficult to do when times are hard and people have more pressing concerns on their mind.

Tish: The science fiction writer David Brin sees two potential futures: In the first, the government watches everybody, and in the second everybody watches everybody. (He calls the latter “ sousveillance.”) Artificial-intelligence enthusiast Ben Goertzel has suggested that providing an artificial intelligence with access to a massive data store fed by ubicomp is the first step toward effective sousveillance.

What do you think the role of AI in ubicomp will be? Is it worth thinking about what the first important application of such technologies might be?

Adam: I don’t believe that “artificial intelligence,” as the term is generally understood— which is to say, a self-aware, general-purpose intelligence of human capacity or greater—is likely to appear within my lifetime, or for a comfortably long time thereafter.

Having said that, Goertzel seems to be making the titanic and enormously difficult to justify assumption that a self-aware artificial intelligence would share

any perspectives, goals, priorities, or values whatsoever with the human species, let alone with that fraction of the human species that could use a little help in countering watchfulness from above. “Hooking an AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp” sounds to me more like the first step toward enslave-ment…if not outright digestion.

“Sousveillance”—the term is Steve Mann’s, originally— doesn’t imply “everybody watching everybody” to me, anyway, so much as a consciously political act of turning infrastructures of observation and control back on those specific institutions most used to employing the same toward their own prerogatives. Think Rodney King, think Oscar Grant.

Tish: You seem to be skeptical about the potential role of everyware in sustainable living. And yet at the moment it seems that—in the hacker and business communities, at least—the role of everyware in reducing carbon footprint/energy management, etc., is the great green hope. Will everyware enable or hinder fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity necessary to support the urgent global need “to consume less and redefine prosperity”?

Adam: I’m not skeptical about the potential of ubiquitous systems to meter energy use, and maybe even incentivize some reduction in that use. Not at all. I’m simply not convinced that anything we do will make any difference.