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A L S O__T O D A Y
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It is possible to loathe the desktop computer without being a Luddite. Just ask Neil Gershenfeld, co-director of the Things That Think consortium at the MIT Media Lab. His new book, "When Things Start to Think," envisions an idyllic world in which the computer has been whisked off the desktop. Instead, he believes, it will be integrated into every other object around us -- allowing us to forget about it completely. As Gershenfeld writes: "In successful mature technologies, it's not possible to isolate the form and the function. The logical design and the mechanical design of a pen or a piano bind their mechanism with their user interface so closely that it's possible to use them without thinking of them as technology, or even thinking of them at all." To this end, "When Things Start to Think" delves into the feasibility of MIT Media Lab projects like digital ink, wearable computers and computing shoes, personal fabricators, sensory furniture -- even computer processors in your wallpaper -- as part of a future in which everything "thinks." Gershenfeld recently spoke with Salon about why this world could be a better place, and why these "thinking" computers will bear little resemblance to previous generations' vision of artificial intelligence. "When Things Start to Think" is hardly the first book to emerge from MIT that forecasts the digital future. How is yours different? The book represents a frustration with the visible dialogue over digital things, which to me seems to be simply missing the point. For example, there was a debate between Nicholas Negroponte and Sven Birkerts [author of "The Gutenberg Elegies"] at the time Nicholas wrote "Being Digital." Nicholas was saying digital things are good and digital books are good; and Sven was saying, no, you're implicitly illiterate, and beautiful printing is wonderful and you can't match the joy of holding a real book. They're both missing the really interesting point, which is that a book is technology -- in its day, it was the highest of technology. When somebody says they'd rather read a book than look at a computer, they don't understand that they're not being anti-technical. They are talking about technology, but what they're really doing is comparing specs. And the specs of the book are generally better than the specs of the laptop. So I turned it around and asked, can new technology work as well as the old technology in the book? That, then, is a very hard problem. But it's increasingly a tractable problem. We can really start to ask that new technology works as well as what it presumes to replace. Similarly, there's been so much coverage of the Web and the Internet. But in so many ways I see that as a small detail. It touches the small subset of human experience that you spend sitting alone dragging a mouse around and clicking in front of a computer screen. I'm sad about people who used to talk to each other sitting alone, browsing the Web. I'm much more interested in bringing the Net up to where people are, and letting things talk to other things so that people don't have to. N E X T_ P A G E .|. The right piece of information at the right time -- remember to buy milk! |
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