9.1 The Multifaceted Me

9.1.1 Supporting a Whole New Life for Each of Us

Each individual has multiple relationships with others and various groups or organizations. In some sense, each person is many people and also a member of many activities. The physical world largely separates these roles in time and space. Well-conceived me-centric computing unifies these facets into one holistic context, aggregates the experiences into a me-centric stream, and allows us to be more people, in more places, even all at once.

This isn't likely to be a small change. It's likely to make us feel both more powerful and more connected, and at the same time more liberated from the physical anchors of the past. Combining both the multifaceted integration of diverse roles with the power of delegation through automated agents , we should expect that many individuals will both feel and actually attain great positions of leverage, power, mobility, and personal effectiveness.

Although it's unlikely that most people will use this to reduce the amount of time they engage in productive activity, it's almost certainly the case that productivity in terms of work, social, political, and intellectual activities will soar. This could take the economy as a whole into an era of unprecedented productivity.

Me-centric computing will change the way we work and live. From a technical point of view, it will be a transition rather than a revolution. Just as the telephone did not replace direct human communication and the television did not replace the cinema, me-centric computing will not replace completely current computing technologies. Desktop computers will probably still be part of everyday life, but they won't be hot technology anymore; they will simply be a commodity. The big business will move on to new paradigms , technologies, and devices.

Technology has changed society over centuries. Without technology, we wouldn't have been able to build up democracies and the kind of lifestyle we are living today. All big cultures in the history of mankind were successful because of their inventions . Their downfall always came at a time when the culture could not re-invent itself anymore. But it proves that such success was possible before the Internet and other high-tech gadgets. Look at Greece more than 2,000 years ago. They were able to build up democracies. We often hear people say that the Internet will guarantee a democratic world, but we don't believe so. The Internet is just a technology, by itself neither good or bad. But just like all technologies, the Internet is able to amplify any effort you put into something. And the same will be true for new me-centric technologies and services.

If you look at the technology presented in this book, you will recognize two major trends: automation and mobility. These are not new trends, but me-centric computing is pushing them onto a new level. While automation of processes has worked well in manufacturing in the past, the Internet and especially me-centric computing allows for process automation in every job. This relieves many people from repetitive tasks , but unless we focus on simplifying these technologies, it also requires that end-users have a better education to be able to use them.

To make sure that everyone can participate, it is necessary to create an easy-to-use technology. It needs to become invisible; only then does it have a chance to reach all groups within a society. The kind of technology we are talking about needs to become embedded so that humans experience the function or benefit rather than the mechanisms that make it work. Automobiles are not invisible, nor are most parts of the mobile platform that make them behave. Instead, the automobile presents us only with a veneer associated with the parts of it we need to access (what Don Norman calls the " affordances " in The Design of Everyday Things ). We need a way to specify mode (park, forward, reverse), a way to specify faster or slower (accelerator, brake pedal), and a way to elect where we choose to sit (doors) and where we choose to store miscellaneous things (trunk, back seat).

Have a look at the relationship the Japanese have with a cell phone. To them, the wireless phone is as intensely personal as a watch or a purse. It's an extension of the body, often with designer leather straps, World Cup flags, rhinestones, or little animal figures dangling off the end. The screen is customized with a screensaver, the ring tone with a song of the user 's choice. In the United States, this affinity to the mobile phone exists on a much lower scale.

A hopeful by-product of this expanding technology will be increased opportunity for everyone, not just the best educated among us.

9.1.2 Changes in Workers' Lives

Two big categories of changes will occur. First, workers, like consumers, can delegate work and specify how to deliver value to them. This increases their productivity enormously. Along with that, their devices support mobility, so they are untethered and can be more effective more often. The second category of changes results from the integration of their lives as workers with all the other roles in their lives: parent, coach, driver, cook, financial manager, etc. They no longer need different devices to switch contexts, and the stream of events that flow to them can be integrated, aggregated, and to a large extent reduced, since many events requiring routine processing can be delegated and dispatched automatically. Companies can thus help their employees be happier , more productive, and more flexible, while at the same time addressing additional possible objectives such as me-centric training.

Through the automation of standard business processes, the amount of work as we know it today will be reduced significantly. This poses a huge problem for many people who build their lives around simple work tasks. For the next generation, the importance of work to make enough money to live a decent life is decreased. In an automated business world, products and services will be available at a fraction of the current costs, making them available to virtually anyone who desires them.

There are a couple of very real concerns that need to be addressed from a social as well as a political viewpoint. For one thing, an automated world may create psychological dependencies on networked communication, thus reducing the demand for relationships in real life. The Internet allows people to hide their identity every time they connect. People may associate more freely online because they are not bound to geographical or temporal limits. This shift in social behavior whether for the positive or the negative, it could be argued either waywill affect both our work lives and our personal lives. Human-to-human interaction will probably become more important to some people, and less important to others.

Additionally, imagine the consequences of shifting a large percentage of work tasks from humans to computers. It remains to be seen whether the reduced amount of work will be distributed evenly among the entire work force or whether it will become a status symbol for the new information elite. It's certain that there will still be work to be done, but it's clear that just as automation in factories and other industries resulted in large employee cutbacks, one can imagine unemployment rates increasing as more and more essential tasks are delegated to devices. In a positive future, this will put more emphasis on meaningful work, such as scientific research, sports, agriculture, and the arts. There will still be a demand for innovation in these fields that can never be fully realized with technology alone. More generally , physical work will continue in importance, with little prospect that me-centric computing will affect it significantly.

9.1.3 Coordinating Business and Social Activities

Assuming we live long enough to see it, there will be a transformation of everyday life made possible by me-centric computing. It will manifest itself in many ways, but some overarching characteristics will stand out. First, computers will seem to disappear into the physical environment, being capable of interacting with people in natural ways, in a wide variety of contexts. People will be able to tell these devices what they need and will receive useful assistance from them.

The reach of humans will be greatly extended, because they will be able to start transactions easily, and these transactions may in turn cause more transactions to happen without additional human intervention. More importantly, the computing field will need to shift focus from giving more applications and tools to users to off-loading unpleasant tasks from people. Even simple things like coordinating social and business activities will become far easier when each of us can have "my assistant call your assistant." Will this, in fact, enable people who have been way too busy to start interacting a whole lot more? We suspect so.

Mobility will also change how society will behave. Many things that take time and effort now will be done on-the-fly in the future. People will be able to do their work from anywhere they want; instead of walking into an office building everyday, many people will do their work from the beach or from home. This will significantly change the way society works. Walking into an office building and staying there from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. provides a frame around the workspace. With pervasiveness, this frame is gone. Leisure and work will not be easily separated anymore. People will move away from a society that had strict rules on when to work and when to rest. Everyone will be able to individualize his or her week. The advantage is that people will have the freedom to plan their week however they want, but the disadvantage is that social contacts with friends and family become much harder to coordinate.

This may lead to a situation where nobody has time for anyone else, because work and leisure shifts are so different that they always collide. Mobility will also enable people to be wherever they want to be. This adds a spatial problem to the timing problem, meaning that even if people would have time to see each other, they may not be very near each other. In the worst case scenario, it could lead to a society of individuals who do not know anything about each other anymore, which makes the individuals unhappy as a result.

But, in fact, technology almost never goes monotonically in the direction of antisocial behavior. People find new ways to use technology for socializing. So e-mail supplants letters , but people communicate more now that ever before. Cell phones enable workers to be isolated from offices, but the entire family and all the kids ' friends are racking up huge cell phone bills because they just have to chat all the time. Web cams don't quite make it for business meetings, but they get all kinds of use in personal situations. See Figure 9.1 for a Web cam of Viareggio in Italy.

Figure 9.1. Web Cam

So we believe that me-centric appliances will increase independence, mobility, and autonomy (as most technologies have done for workers), but will be employed to enhance and increase frequency of social engagement. My agents, for example, will make it easier for me to get reservations at hard-to-get-into restaurants and coordinate schedules with friends so that we socialize more, not less often. We will be able to get our kids enrolled in appropriate programs more often with less aggravation and effort, and as a result I will have more time to apply to myself , my activities, and my friendships. These are just some examples of how these new technologies can enhance the social life of every human.

9.1.4 Information Literacy

Me-centric computing will become the major form of communication for educational institutions and businesses all over the world. Governments are catching up fast, and we need to ensure that everyone will get access to me-centric computing. In today's computing paradigm, everybody needs to have the right hardware, the right software, and the necessary knowledge to make use of the content and services. This type of knowledge is called information literacy .

Print literacy is still a major problem around the world. In many countries , many people cannot read or write. Today, these people have almost no chance to use a computer, because they cannot read. Today's computing paradigm is an elite information infrastructure, accessible only to those who have the resources, skills, and knowledge. This increases the gap between the rich and the poor.

To ensure global access to the me-centric computing architecture, the education standards around the world do not need to be raised (although this is always a good idea). New paradigms of accessing information will be implemented that allow the less fortunate to access the basic services via graphical symbols, for example. Just as you don't have to be literate to drive a car (because the affordances are physical), you don't have to be literate to communicate with an intelligent appliance (you talk and it talks).

Moreover, as we mentioned previously, me-centric (intelligent) interfaces are a perfect antidote to physical handicaps (such as blindness, deafness, or paralysis), because they can provide alternate affordances. We believe literacy can provide a higher floor for exploitation, but me-centric intelligent interfaces can use existing human skills (e.g., natural language) as an alternative to previous requirements for literacy.