IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

204 Chapter 9
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, as ISTAG puts it,
in 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. 58
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. One paper presented at the conference, held in Santorini,
looked forward to ‘‘anthropocentric interfaces’’ that, enabled by
‘‘cognition technologies,’’ will ‘‘enhance or substitute for our senses.’’ 59
Context-aware and proactive systems will ‘‘hide overall system complexity,
and preserve human attention, by delivering to us only information which
is rich with meanings and contexts.’’ Faced with a ‘‘tera-world’’ filled with
‘‘open, unbound, dynamic and intelligent systems,’’ we will soon need to
‘‘provide them with learning, and gracefully evolving capabilities, as well
as self-diagnosis, self-adaptation, and self-organization capabilities.’’ Now
maybe I am missing something, but to me this translates as: Build systems
that are too complicated to understand and then, after they are deployed,
find ways to master their complexity. Hmmm.