Thesis 68

Given that, in principle, all of the underpinnings necessary to construct a robust everyware already exist, the time for intervention is now.

The lack of design documentation, the absence of widely agreed-upon standards, the yawning gaps in deployed network infrastructure, and above all the inordinate complexity of many of the challenges involved in everyware certainly suggest that its deployment is in some sense a problem for the longer term. Perhaps we're reading too much into the appearance of a few disarticulated systems; it's possible that the touchless payment systems and tagged cats and self-describing lampposts are not, after all, part of some overarching paradigm.

If, on the other hand, you do see these technologies as implying something altogether larger, then maybe we ought to begin developing a coherent response. It is my sense that if its pieces are all in placeeven if only in principlethen the time is apt for us to begin articulating some baseline standards for the ethical and responsible development of user-facing provisions in everyware.

We should do so, in other words, before our lives are blanketed with the poorly imagined interfaces, infuriating loops of illogic, and insults to our autonomy that have characterized entirely too much human-machine interaction to date. Especially with genuinely ubiquitous systems like PayPass and Octopus starting to appear, there's a certain urgency to all this.

As it turns out, after some years of seeing his conception of ubicomp garbledfirst by "naively optimistic" engineers, and then by "overblown and distorted" depictions of its dangers in the general-interest mediaMark Weiser had given some thought to this. In a 1995 article called "The Technologist's Responsibilities and Social Change," he enumerated two principles for inventors of "socially dangerous technology":

1. Build it as safe as you can, and build into it all the safeguards to personal values that you can imagine.

2. Tell the world at large that you are doing something dangerous.

In a sense, that's the project of this book, distilled into 32 words.

What Weiser did not speak to on this occasionand he was heading into the final years of his life, so we will never know just how he would have answered the questionwas the issue of timing. When is it appropriate to "tell the world at large"? How long should interested parties wait before pointing out that not all of the "appropriate safeguards" have been built into the ubiquitous systems we're already being offered?

My guess, in both cases, is that Weiser's response would be the earliest possible moment, when there's still at least the possibility of making a difference. Even if everyware does take the next hundred years to emerge in all its fullness, the time to assert our prerogatives regarding its evolution is now.