We’re entering a world where the Web enters and interacts with everyday life. They talk about about RFID, near-field communications, online/inline and glanceable interfaces. There’s a great video down the bottom that explains it all in a lot of detail.

What we’re talking about is things like:

• Nike + – personal information aggregation and sharing.
• Wattson and Holmes – power usage visualised more easily
• Oyster cards – ticketless travel payment
• Nabaztag – physical gadgets conveying Internet information

And super animal senses. Sorry, SUPER ANIMAL SENSES!!! With my own normal human senses failing rapidly, I’m especially interested in this. Some guy is making gadgets that will replace them with SUPER ANIMAL ones.

The prototype described is about knowing which way is North, like migratory birds do. There’s a buzzer in your pocket that goes off whenever you’re pointing northwards. Over time, you stop noticing the buzzer but always know which way North is.

We’ve seen the children’s/stalker’s toys that can pick up conversations from a distance. This is the Super Ear sound-enhancer that can pick up speech from 100 yards.

We’ve seen Silence of the Lambs and so forth and can see how seeing in the dark might work. Here’s the Cobra-Vision night-vision goggles:

Let’s halve the cost and the size for five years, as per a slightly-mangled-but-historically-reasonable Moore’s Law. I reckon I have Super Animal Senses by 2020.

And here’s the video I referenced. It’s about 30 minutes, but well worth it:

image credit: GreenFlames09

Bruce Sterling “Shaping Things” (Lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

The video is of Bruce Sterling at the Lift conference last year, reflecting on his 2005 book Shaping Things. I’m going to summarise it, so if you haven’t got 22 minutes and a strong tolerance for poor audio editing, read on. It is about the Internet of Things, the idea and practise of giving objects in the physical world an Internet presence, through RFID tags, stickybits or somesuch.

One example is the Internet fridge that know when you’re running out of milk and orders some more. Another is Tower Bridge’s Twitter account. Proponents of this sort of technology imagine a future where everything is tagged – where you can Google your car keys to find out where you left them, or a clean pair of underpants. Shops could automatically charge you for the things you leave with, as you move through the scanner at the door. Theft becomes practically impossible since the location of objects is always trackable. Sterling coined the word ‘spime’ for these tagged, findable, identifiable objects – since they have co-ordinates in space and time.

In the video, he mainly talks about the ways in which his vision has gone awry or changed since he wrote the book.

Taxonomy – tagging or labelling things turns out to be trickier than it seems at first glance. This is the ‘magic word’ ontological problem. a) People disagree about the names of things — is it a bap, a barmcake or a bread roll? b) Our names for things change over time: e.g. ‘Web 2.0’ seems quite an old-fashioned expression now, just five years after its invention. c) There are numerous regional/demographic linguistic variations that actually describe semantic and psychological differences – seven words for snow in Inuit, that sort of thing. d) What about the components of the thing you are tagging – do they get tags too? And how deep do you go with that – if you started tagging a laptop, for example, where would you stop?

Ownership – tied with this is the problem of who does the tagging. Should it be the government and large corporations, as was the case with the implementation of barcodes? Or should these tags develop more democratically, a folksonomy, if you like? Naming is a form of ownership, so the latter may feel more politically acceptable, if not perhaps as well-organised.

Privacy and Tracking – Googling your car keys sounds like a cool idea, but what about if other people can do that? Who would you trust with that information and how could you control it? People are understandably anxious about revealing their location, the status of their underwear and so forth. Sterling suggests that there are ‘about a million bad ways’ to implement this sort of thing – and that we’ll probably try half a million of these before we find useful techniques.

Recycling – a possible big win for item-tagging is making us more aware of our waste, something towards which we tend to have something of a natural aversion. If we continue to ‘own’ the items we discard, it ought to make us more careful about their disposal and less likely to destroy the planet. However, we probably need to act a bit faster than this is likely to happen as a technology.

Sterling closes by remarking that these debates may just disappear as spimes become the norm. This seems likely to me, as uneasy as that makes me feel. We are very quick to change our social mores to take advantage of new technologies. I bought my first mobile phone ten years ago. Before that point, it was effectively impossible to make (or break) ad-hoc arrangements with friends that weren’t physically present. Now it is the norm, and we don’t think twice about it. The moral and social dilemmas surrounding this have simply become invisible.

Perhaps surprisingly, spimification is happening to people faster than it is happening to objects. Nearly all higher-end mobile phones today have an embedded GPS device and a unique identity code – its ESN – that connects it to you. The ones that don’t can still be located using cell tower triangulation. I would imagine that under some circumstances, probably more than we know, the authorities can use this as a Verichip (the chips people inject into their dogs – or children – so they can be found). The only difference between your phone and the ankle-bracelets they put on bailed prisoners is psychological.

That won’t be necessary in the future. The location status game Foursquare has more than three-quarters of a million members and allows you to voluntarily do this to yourself without MI5 lifting a finger. People are already turning themselves into spimes. You don’t even need to make a decision: the data you produce is already enough to reveal all sorts of information about you. Today, these behaviours may seem potentially risky, odd and perhaps egotistical. Tomorrow, it may seem equally odd – even suspicious – if no-one knows where you are and what you’re doing.

picture credit: *janina*