12 February 2007
Ramblings and Ubicomp
Ok, it sounds to me like Ubicomp has some pretty promising possibilities in store for us. I like the idea of waking up in the morning and by that simple act, having my shower hot and ready to go. I also love the idea of checking my email in the mirror as I brush my teeth. Better still, if my breakfast and coffee could be hot and ready to enjoy, sweet. I wonder if ubicomp could let my dog out in the morning? etc. etc. But it sounds like there are at least a few unsettling possibilities. The main issue I don't like deals with the idea of privacy. I say idea because I know there is no real privacy, you just have to be careful with what you put out there; it boils down to common sense. But with ubicomp, common sense might not be enough. I sound paranoid, but I'm just trying to make a point: in a shrinking world, privacy tends to disappear. Now some examples: I definitely don't like the idea of getting spammed on the walk from my car to my office. I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea of some wired up, smart toilet snitching on me to my boss, my doctor, or the cops. To sum it up, the ubicomp fictionalized in the movie Minority Report, yeah that bugs me. If ubicomp turns out to be anything like that I'm moving to Alaska. Which brings me to my next tangent. Let's say we attain some level of ubicomp, ok everythings good, life is simple, we're interfacing like there's no tomorrow...oh crap everything just broke, what now? I remember those rolling blackouts in California a few years back, what the hell happens to ubicomp in the face of something like that? Mass hysteria, cats and dogs living together? Ok I jest but its serious, stuff breaks and ubicomp is no different. We have to remember ubicomp is just a tool, a tool we apply to our enviroment. Sometimes tools break.
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3 comments:
I wonder if law-breaking punishment would get stricter concerning the damaging of property, since all this everyware will most likely be very expensive to fix and keep up maintenance. And if people aren't breaking it or tagging it, like Jeremy said, everything breaks down at some point. Will we be able to get all the technological kinks out of everyware items? We seemed to have already reached this crossroad of not wanting to look like a Cyberdork with this kind of technology on. Maybe instead i should be asking, how long will it take to get these kinks out? Most everyone has met (and reintroducing themselves in colorful words most likely) my good friend The Blue Screen of Death given lovingly from Microsoft, will there be an equivalent to show an error...or will we just be talking to a dead wall or being woken up at 2 in the morning to the coffee maker going haywire?
Yeah! so that is a good debate on what will come of cultural crossing of an everyware society which seems to be where we are heading. If you think about it we are no more less culturally confusing without ubiquitous computing. Our social complexity and machine culture seems like it would be extremely hard to determine coming from a foreign point of view from another culture. Although if you think about the automated possibilities of a ubiquitous culture foreign cultures wouldn't have to interact with the manual aspect of our machines. I'm not sure that cleared up anything but I do feel this is an interesting topic needed to be addressed by our cultural changes in technology.
I've wondered the same thing- what happens if it breaks? No, more correctly, WHEN it breaks? I mean, consider what happens when a computer crashes now. Now imagine that applied to the entire world at once. I don't know about mass hysteria, although it is possible. I think that would depend on how deeply our lives are intertwined with the technology. At one end, it could be the same annoyance of losing, say, your alarm clock to a power outage. But on the other end of the scale, it could be like pulling the plug on your life support. We have to remember as this technology becomes part of our daily lives that it is still, like Jeremy said, a tool. And only a tool. It won't create an alternate world, and we can't depend on it as such.
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