IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

so small we can barely see them, the 747 has joined the ‘‘internet of
things.’’ 34
Smartness 199
Increasingly, many of the chips around us will sense their environment
in rudimentary but effective ways. The sensory and motoric capacities of
networks will continue to grow. Companies are already building so-called
hard, real-time systems in which the maximum response time will be one
microsecond. These systems are based on billions of microprocessors—
man-made synapses, processing away silently all around us. 35 More than
half of all devices sold with computing in them nowadays include a thirtytwo-bit
chip—the threshold needed to make them truly networked and
interactive. As writer Bruce Sterling so memorably put it, the way things
are going, ‘‘you will go into the garden to look at the flowers—and the
flowers will look at you.’’ 36
A world in which products and appliances talk to one another sounds
fantastic, but it’s not so long since the advent of electricity was greeted
with similar amazement. Then, objects that once had to be worked by
hand began to power themselves. When electricity was first introduced
into the home, there was a tendency in industry to portray its aims, its
technological prowess, and its dynamic power in mythological terms.
Germany’s AEG, for example, used the goddess of light as its trademark.
But once electricity’s magical novelty wore off and a majority of everyday
products began to be ‘‘electrified,’’ designers had to find new ways to make
electric irons, kettles, lightbulbs, and cookers interesting to consumers. Reasoning
that ‘‘even an electric motor must look like a birthday present,’’
artist-designers like AEG’s Peter Behrens turned themselves into industrial
designers to accomplish just that. In 1903 Behrens’s boss, Paul Westheim,
observed of design at the dawn of the electrical age that ‘‘in order to make a
lucid, logical and clearly articulated entity out of an arc lamp, a complete
transformation of our aesthetic notions was necessary.’’ 37 Does the same
apply today to embedded computing? If the rapid electrification of everyday
life just three generations ago is any guide, embedded computing will
not prove controversial for people. Electric motors, too, soon disappeared
from view, where they remain, in vast numbers, humming away inside a
swarm of everyday household products. With pervasive computing another
new presence has come into our lives, and it, too, lacks visible form or
expression.