The Disappearing Computer

The seminal text is Mark Weiser's The Computer for the 21st Century, with its much-quoted beginning:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

🔥This is the key to what IoT is🔥

It is pretty unbelievable for a vision of about forty years old to have come true as it means connecting every - now most - objects on the planet being digitally addressable, even if that means in most cases current passively, being able to be read by an RFID reader, intelligent cameras or drones. The drive towards full connectivity was there right from the beginning.

It was most articulate voiced by a European research program called The Disappearing Computer:

The Disappearing Computer (DC) is an EU-funded proactive initiative of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) activity of the Information Society Technologies (IST) research program (2001-2003). The initiative's mission is to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings and how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people's lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today.

Specifically, the initiative focuses on three interlinked objectives:

✅ Create information artefacts based on new software and hardware architectures integrated into everyday objects.
✅ Look at how collections of artefacts can act together to produce new behaviour and functionality.
✅ Investigate the new approaches for designing collections of artefacts in everyday settings and how to ensure people's experience in these new environments is coherent and engaging.

It is clear that these questions relate to what is now called the #AI debate, yet they became tied to the applications and services of IoT and its reference architectures.

The primary question of how we want to live together with an intelligent environment was never really part of a general discussion, yet had it been adequately addressed; we would have been able to embed AI into a clear framework of real operational value - the actual devices - instead of regulating it.

I was at one of the kick-off sessions of the project, and in Jonschoping 2000, I first encountered the vision:

Electricity was the metaphor the EU 1st project officer, Jakub Wechjert, used. He spoke of a vision of the future in which our everyday world of objects and places becomes 'infused' and 'augmented' with information processing. Computing, information processing, and computers disappear into the background and take on a role more similar to electricity today - an invisible, pervasive medium distributed in the real world. In contrast, what will appear to people are new artefacts and augmented places that support and enhance activities in natural, simple and intuitive ways.

That, however, does not make it more unproblematic. What we encounter in such an environment is the problematic and futile attempts to claim any which one – subject/ time/ space/ place – as an undisputed starting point for making meaning or sense, for deciding on how to act, for recalling how previous procedures operated, for projecting a sense of self into the future. In a mediated environment, it is no longer clear what is being mediated and what mediates. Such environments - your kitchen, living room, our shopping malls, cobbled streets in old villages, are new beginnings as they reformulate our sense of ourselves in places in spaces in time. As new beginnings, they begin new media.

I was dozing off in the big Conference Hall, thinking about all these new beginnings, this longing for new space to occupy as if it was the wild, Wild West.

What worried me most were some somewhat satisfied minds. I, too, could visualise a setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes. Simulating processes that are actual processes, for in a digitised real, any process might become experiential, might resonate.

Then a speaker, I believe it was Streitz, came on stage. He spoke of a Bluetooth ring that, whenever I walked in the woods, could – if I so liked – enhance this walk for me (I wondered who needs to improve a wood?🤔) by activating a mechanism that would either reveal a screen near the tree or send information on a handheld computer. And on that screen, I could read some more about that tree.

I was wide awake, and I felt very strange. I looked around me, searching for any human presence in that lecture room to wink at me and tell me it was all a big, sick joke.

I recalled my sword and King Arthur and my talking trees. No screens there. That was when I realised. I asked myself, could some of what these people talk about be dangerous?

The best thing I can do is stay close to them, track what they are interested in and either hack it or try to confuse the spaces in which they operate.

From my tone, you can gather that I was still in shock.

Here was a vision of a world in which computing would disappear into the known environment as if computing was a set of democratic processes, which it was not. It was not a naive decision; it was taken entirely for granted, even if the audience was filled with engineers, designers, and ethnographers.

The very notion of AI was already entangled in that vision and programme. At the heart of decision making, which up until that point had been purely a human toolset that, however, it took skills was potentially within reach of any person (arguably a problematic statement given the distance between public and elite).

👉 Please feel free to check my work "The Internet Of Things: A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID" for more information.

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🔔Do you want to learn more about the Next Generation Internet?🔔

If so, I invite you to learn more in this NGI Talk to discover NGI's journey, goals, and achievements.

🎥 Watch the webinar recording by clicking here.

Rob.