Thesis 24

Everyware, or something very much like it, is effectively inevitable.

We've considered some of the ways the emergence of everyware seems to be overdetermined. There are forces aplenty driving its appearance, from the needs of the elderly infirm in the world's richest societies to those of nonliterate users in the developing world.

There is an argument to be made that the apparent significance of these drivers is illusorythat Weiser and the other prophets of ubiquitous technology were simply wrong about what people would want from computing, and particularly that they underestimated the persistent appeal of the general-purpose desktop machine despite its flaws.

In this view, most of the products or services we've discussed here will come to fruition, but they'll never amount to much more than bits and pieces, an incoherent scatter of incompatible technologies. Meanwhile, for quite some time to come, we'll continue to interact with information technology much as we have for the last decade, using ever more-sophisticated and possibly more-"converged," but essentially conventional, PCs.

In fairness, there's plenty of empirical support for this position. The streamlined "information appliances" Don Norman imagined got their trial in the market and failed; despite flattering notices in magazine articles and the like, I've never actually met someone who owns one of the "ambient devices" supposed to represent the first wave of calm technology for the home. There seems to be little interest in the various "digital home" scenarios, even among the cohort of consumers who could afford such things and have been comparatively enthusiastic about high-end home theater.^[*]

^[*] A Motorola executive, interviewed in a recent issue of The Economist, asserted the rather patronizing viewpoint that if customers didn't want these conveniences, they'd simply have to be "educated" about their desirability until they did manage to work up the appropriate level of enthusiasm. In other words, "the floggings will continue until morale improves."

But I don't think this is anything like the whole story. In fact, barring the wholesale collapse of highly technological civilization on Earth, I believe the advent of some fairly robust form of everyware is effectively inevitable, at least in the so-called "First World." So many of the necessary material and intellectual underpinnings are already fully developed, if not actually deployed, that it is very hard to credit scenarios beyond the near term in which ubiquitous computing does not play some role in everyday life. All the necessary pieces of the puzzle are sitting there on the tabletop, waiting for us to pick them up and put them together.

But let's first do away with the idea that I am depending on a lawyerly, not to say Clintonian, parsing of definitions. Proclaiming the inevitability of everyware would be a fatuously empty proposition if all I meant by it was that touchless e-cash transactions would begin to replace credit cards, or that you'll soon be able to answer your phone via your television. I mean to assert, rather, that everyware, the regime of ambient informatics it gives rise to, and the condition of ambient findability they together entrain, will have significant and meaningful impact on the way you live your life and will do so before the first decade of the twenty-first century is out.

This is such a strong claim that I'll devote the remainder of this chapter to supporting it in sufficient detail that I believe you will be convinced, whatever your feelings at the moment.