Beyond the Internet

If you think of how many computers we're all surrounded by now it may seem strange to think that during the 21st century they just might disappear altogether. And yet according to the pioneers of information technology (IT) that's exactly what's likely to happen. Not that we're heading back to the days of hand written ledgers and the abacus -- far from it. What it means is that computers are literally going to be absorbed by their surroundings and embedded in walls, carpets, toasters, neckties, and even our own bodies. As computing dissolves into the environment it will become as pervasive as the electricity flowing through society. In a controversial prediction, some scientists suggest the earth will be wrapped in a "digital skin," transmitting signals over the Internet almost as a living creature relays impulses through its nervous system. Millions of sensors will probe and monitor highways, cities, factories, forests, oceans, and the atmosphere. Some will be linked to orbiting satellites -- extending the reach of this digital infrastructure into outer space.

Scientists refer to this scenario as ubiquitous or pervasive computing. Either way, the bottom line is the same: an unprecedented level of connectivity. The international consulting firm Ernst & Young predicts that by 2010 there will be nearly 10,000 telemetric devices (meaning devices that transmit or receive data) for every person on earth. Managing connectivity on a scale like this will be too difficult for humans to do on their own. In the future, network management will be partially delegated to software programs called agents that learn about their users and act autonomously on their behalf. The way humans interact with computers will also change profoundly. Instead of typing commands into a passive box, humans will use speech and physical gestures to communicate with computers much as they do with anyone else. Computer networks will in turn be adaptive, intelligent, and self-organizing.

The pace of change in computing is dizzying even to those advancing its leading edge. Neil Gershenfeld, the co-director of the Things That Think consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, admits he no longer tries predicting when some futuristic technology might appear because it almost invariably turns up years before he thought it would. Much of the basic infrastructure for ubiquitous computing is actually already here -- the Internet is up and running, processing power is increasing daily, and advances in wireless technology are exploding. For example, emerging systems like Wideband Code Division Multiple Access will soon increase wireless data rates to two megabits per second; fast enough to download songs and movies from the Web. This capacity points to a future in which handheld devices are used to access a wide range of databases and other kinds of networked tools.

In addition to the social ramifications, ubiquitous computing also has important implications for the environment. In fact, many scientists view the promise of real-time data flowing over self-managing networks as a bright light in the future of environmental protection. How do chemical pollutants move through oceans and the atmosphere? Can we link ecological changes to fluctuations in the global environment? Today, scientists investigating difficult problems like these rely on computer models and incomplete measurement data that are sporadic at best. But when self-powered sensors in the field "talk" to each other we can set up dynamic databases that reduce the uncertainty in these analyses. With better information will come better decisionmaking, and with that, environmental policies that are more responsive to ecological needs.

Integrating physical objects and the Internet will also lead to a new era of "intelligent" manufacturing and distribution that will save scarce resources. Just five to ten years from now, manufacturers will track products from razor blades to tuna cans remotely with radiofrequency communication. This will not only boost recycling and facilitate inventory management, it will also allow companies to conserve energy and reduce waste by matching manufacturing and supplies to real-time demand. Farther in the future, some products will be simply downloaded from the Internet and printed directly where used, eliminating the need to expend energy in transportation. Describing what might as well be a scene from the 1960s' television show "The Jetsons," Gershenfeld suggests future households will print three-dimensional items like wine glasses and toy jeeps on a device called a "fabricator." Sound far-fetched? It's already happening. Three-dimensional printing is underway at the Media Laboratory now, although it will be years before the technology is widely available.

Without doubt, this view of the digital future also has a darker side. Threats to personal privacy, hacking, increasing network vulnerability, and digital terrorism are all serious and unresolved issues. And there are myriad technical hurdles yet to be overcome. Whether society is ready to embrace this "second wave of connectivity" is debatable. John Seely Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox, suggests its environmental benefits can be realized only when society shifts from a traditional focus on personal computing toward broader concepts based on adaptive, self-organizing systems. But how and when this shift will take place remains to be seen.

Most people might think computers isolate humans and distance them from the natural world. And certainly the image of someone sitting alone for hours mesmerized by the gentle hum and glowing screen of a plastic box supports this view. But changes in computing might also bring humans closer to their environment and enable them to better understand and manage the natural world around them. The sections that follow in this chapter describe the ways in which this might happen.

The Networked Physical World

Down in the trenches of MIT's famous Media Laboratory, Associate Professor Neil Gershenfeld is reflecting on the bits and the atoms. "The bits are the good stuff," he muses, referring to these units of digital information. "They consume no resources, they travel at the speed of light, we can copy them, they can disappear, we can send them around the globe and construct billion dollar companies." Contrasting them with physical objects, he says, "The atoms are the bad stuff. They consume resources, you have to throw them away, they're old-fashioned." A challenge for the millennium, he explains, is to find ways to "bring the bits into the physical world."

The basic idea behind linking bits and atoms is finding ways of getting physical objects to communicate with computers through a digital network. Technologists see this as a way to liberate computing from the confines of the PC and bring it out into the world at large. John Seely Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox, compares computing today to "walking around with your peripheral vision blocked by a pair of tubes on your glasses." And Gershenfeld says the problem with PCs now is that they only touch that "subset of human experience spent sitting in front of a desk." Both scientists say that to be truly useful, computers should be brought into the stuff of everyday life, in part by embedding them into ordinary objects and machines.

These advances will usher in a new era of ubiquitous computing, in which inexpensive servers bring Internet access to household appliances and office equipment. People will take for granted that microwave ovens download cooking instructions from the Web or that alarm clocks reset themselves after a power outage. The cheapest gateways to the Internet will comprise sensors and radiofrequency (RF) tags linked to networked microprocessors. An RF tag is actually a silicon chip that emits an electronic signal in the presence of the energy field created by a device called a reader. Tags already have some familiar uses -- for instance driving through an automatic toll booth causes an RF tag to boot up and identify your car.

In the near future, by linking them to the Internet, tags and readers will open up new worlds of opportunities. Conceivably, "smart" fridges could monitor tagged products, learn your food preferences and shopping schedule, and eventually buy all your groceries for you. Washing machines could monitor colors -- toss a tagged red sock into a pile of white laundry, and the machine will shut down. Tagged pill bottles in a medicine cabinet could allow doctors to monitor patient compliance with prescriptions, remotely.

One group working to blanket the consumer marketplace with this technology is the MIT-based Auto-ID Center, a consortium of academic and industry scientists seeking to replace bar codes with a system that tracks manufactured products with pervasive grids of readers in warehouses, trucks, stores, and the home. Once the infrastructure is operational, companies will be able to determine the whereabouts of all their products, all the time. This capability could provide some important environmental benefits: real-time product tracking will enable manufacturers to save millions in cash and energy resources by shifting to a process that matches production to consumption, item for item. And tagged products could also become self-managing; able to convey their identity and composition to networked trash containers and recycling centers.

Here Come the Jetsons

In another bit of futuristic innovation, scientists are devising ways to ship bits rather than atoms to manufacture products remotely. Someday, printers called "personal fabricators" will be used to make things like toy jeeps and wine glasses in the comfort of your own home. Scientists at the Media Lab are already printing semiconductors, transistors, and other electronic devices as if they were made out of paper. Simple three-dimensional objects have already been printed as well, with more complicated structures just around the corner.

Gershenfeld suggests personal fabrication has both an environmental upside and downside. On the one hand, the technology could save energy by reducing energy expenditures involved in transporting a product to its point of use. On the other, three-dimensional printing could inundate society with objects, in the same way the "paperless office" is in reality saturated with more paper than ever. The only way the personal fabricator could become environmentally feasible would be to equip it with a "defabricator" that breaks objects down to their constituent materials.

The Future of Remote Sensing

Look into the future of the digital world and you might find the digital world is looking right back at you. Advances in remote sensing are giving computer networks the eyes and ears they need to observe their physical surroundings. Sensors detect physical changes in pressure, temperature, light, sound, or chemical concentrations and then send a signal to a computer that does something in response. Scientists expect that billions of these devices will someday form rich sensory networks linked to digital backbones that put the environment itself online. The goal, says David Tennenhouse, the former chief scientist at DARPA and current director of research at Intel, will be to use dense arrays of networked sensors to extract as much "information per unit volume," about the environment as possible.

Smart Dust

Much of the research driving small, inexpensive sensors is found in the area of MEMS, short for microelectromechanical systems. Scientists working with MEMS are creating tiny electronic features from silicon, some of them smaller than a red blood cell. MEMS is common in the computer chip industry but the technology extends to sensor design as well. For example, Kris Pister, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is developing a sensor he calls "smart dust" designed to be so small it literally floats in the air. These minute devices are self-powered and contain tiny on-board sensors and a computer on a scale of just five square millimeters -- roughly the size of an aspirin tablet. Pister is confident he can reduce their size to a single millimeter by 2001 and to airborne dust-like dimensions by 2003. The idea is to use them by the thousands in interconnected networks that communicate with each other using wireless signals. The environmental possibilities are highly varied: Pister envisions smart dust "motes" sprinkled out of airplanes monitoring the atmosphere or hovering in the dark recesses of factory stacks monitoring pollution, or used in farms to measure soil chemistry and pesticide levels. It's currently possible to pack the motes with the computing power of the first Intel computer chip -- just 200 microns long (one micron = one millionth of a meter) -- for about 10 cents. However, continuing advances in MEMS are expected to push the price down below a penny sometime in the future.

Smart dust motes are powered with batteries, which has raised some health concerns because the batteries contain toxic metals like lead and cadmium. But Pister dismisses contamination questions because the amounts of heavy metals used are so small. And when asked if inhaled motes could pose a health threat, he says, "Even if you did inhale them, they are too big to be absorbed. You would just cough them up."

The Eyes in the Sky

The most far-reaching environmental profiles will come from satellite-based remote sensors in space. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) envision rich flows of environmental data coming from grids of complementary satellites circling the globe. A number of satellites are already monitoring the global environment now. For example, the bus-sized Terra satellite, sent into orbit by the Earth Observing System (EOS) at NASA in December 1999, is measuring 16 of 24 parameters known to play a role in determining climate. Among these are aerosols, clouds, temperature, vegetation, and radiation. One of the most popular applications for satellite images involves linking them to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a combination used to study global land use patterns; track oil spills, forest fires, and deforestation; and monitor the health of coral reefs.

To increase resolution, NASA is equipping its satellites with so-called "active" sensors that obtain data from lasers and radar that are shot down to target areas and reflected back to an on-board detector. One example is the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR, which beams lasers directly into forest canopies to investigate an elusive parameter scientists see as a kind of holy grail: the global carbon cycle. According to senior NASA scientist Jim Closs, measurements of the global carbon cycle will provide the clearest long-term picture yet of carbon dioxide fluctuations and their influence on global warming. Advances are also being made in hyperspectral remote sensing, which extracts greater amounts of data from reflected radiation than currently used technologies. These sensors yield precise measurements of chemicals in the atmosphere and, according to Closs, will allow scientists to double, or even triple, the number of parameters currently monitored.

The number of data satellites produced in a month now would have taken ten years to generate a decade ago, leading to difficult questions about how the data are going to be managed. Current processing capabilities are keeping up with the flow, but just barely. Mark Gray, a senior programmer at NASA, says the terabyte of raw data NASA collects from satellites every day -- equal to one trillion bits of information -- is beginning to strain computational capacity. To improve its storage capabilities, NASA is piggy-backing on commercially driven improvements by partnering with private-sector companies including Oracle and Silicon Graphics Inc.

But satellite sensors will comprise only part of a broader distributed network with its roots on earth. In the future, millions of low-cost devices embedded throughout the environment will add to the data-management challenge. At the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, researchers are working to solve the problem by designing systems that transfer intelligence to the sensors themselves. This approach is based on a growing technology called "intelligent multitasking." Ramesh Govinda, a computer scientist at the ISI, suggests that embedded intelligence would eliminate the need for a centralized data processing facility. Each sensor would carry a microcomputer and some communications abilities, providing for collaborative signal processing and the ability to make "group decisions" about which data to send and when. For example, sensors in a factory could be designed to respond to toxic releases and spills, perhaps by shutting down an industrial process. If the release extended beyond industrial perimeters, factory-based sensors would communicate with networks of municipal sensors, in turn, initiating a series of protective actions directly within the community.

Eventually, remote sensing data will be accessible to the ordinary citizen on the street. For example, someone with a handheld wireless device will someday be able to access satellite data from the Internet, overlay it with GIS coordinates, and obtain on-the-spot atmospheric information for any location on the planet. Tennenhouse suggests that intelligent homes in the future will link to atmospheric satellite data and monitor their own internal environments accordingly. The key to all these applications is they will take humans out of the loop -- the sensor networks will be intelligent, proactive, and able to respond to environmental changes at lightning speed without human intervention. In this fashion, remote sensors will enable computers not only to "see" their environment, but also to shape their physical surroundings.

Autonomous Electronic Markets

Markets have traditionally operated in a vacuum of information leading to myriad inefficiencies. For example, sellers exploiting buyer ignorance and distance between retailers have set their own fixed prices and imposed them on customers. And manufacturers at the mercy of inaccurate demand predictions are often stuck with either too much inventory or not enough. But with the advent of e-commerce, some of these inefficiencies are starting to shrink. Geography matters less and with the touch of a few keys consumers have ample access to pricing information and a product's "true" value. With distributed online information, markets are coming into a new era of interactive pricing involving the buyer and seller alike. Some suggest the Internet could be an instrument that drives capitalism towards its purest form -- a seamless, efficient, and self-correcting system of supply and demand.

The Environmental Marketplace

Today, environmental commodities can be bought or sold like any other. For example, under the Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), companies can buy and sell the right to pollute based on a system of trading emissions "allowances" on the free market. Under the law, companies emitting less than their assigned caps on emissions can sell allowance credits to other companies that exceed their own caps. This enables the polluter to choose the most cost-effective option for achieving compliance: either buying pollution credits or installing stack scrubbers and other expensive equipment to clean their emissions. The only stipulation is that regional air quality continues to meet federal standards. Companies bid for the allowances on an open market in which prices vary according to market conditions.

Computer-assisted environmental markets for clean air allowances are now in place in a number of areas. For example, the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM) of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles, California, is using a system called Automated Credit Exchange (ACE) for trades in sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen. The multiple land zones, applicable years of emissions, and overlapping regulatory cycles have so many elaborate combinatorial options there's no way a company could price the credits, nor realize financial benefit from the system, without computer software. On the ACE market, companies can buy or sell credits for different years and regulatory cycles at one point in time. The package calculates the best way to sell the credits by evaluating all the possible trades and calculating market prices for each part of the credit package. John Ledyard, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and one of the designers of the ACE system used in Los Angeles, says the success of the program shows computationally assisted markets not only create financial liquidity in these complex situations, they also enable market-based regulatory policies to succeed.

Because pollution credits in Los Angeles are sold infrequently, once a week at most, there's little need for rapid Web-based communications. But in a more active system with frequent trading, real-time communications on the Internet could be indispensable. One framework in which the Internet could play a vital role is the Kyoto Protocol. This multinational treaty has a target of reducing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 time frame. One way it aims to achieve this is by establishing a mechanism for trading credits (designated "assigned amounts units" or AAUs) for carbon dioxide, a gas suspected of contributing to global warming. As with the CAAA, under the Kyoto Protocol it doesn't matter who cuts their emissions, just so long as there is a net global reduction. Assuming the treaty were implemented, companies throughout the world would be bidding for AAUs on a global market -- across time zones, currencies, and more. According to leading e-commerce researcher and Caltech professor Charles Plott, real-time transactions involving all the various players will be crucial in order to optimize the efficiency of the system.

Plott and his colleagues at Caltech's Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science have recently created a model through which companies can bid for AAUs on the Internet. The model is called the International Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Marketspace, and it was developed in collaboration with the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Participants using the model can project emissions trends into the future, simulate sudden variations in their inventories, and calculate the effects of domestic emissions policies on AAU pricing. Empowered with this information, they can compare the cost of buying the credits versus taking action to reduce emissions.

Got Bots?

Eventually, future e-markets could become so complex, with so many participants and competing market variables, that human oversight would be a hindrance. Researchers and software companies have set high hopes on so-called software agents, which learn about their users' interests and act independently on their behalf. IBM researcher Jeff Kephardt describes the "autonomous" e-markets of the future as "a seething milieu in which billions of economically motivated software agents find and process information and disseminate it to humans and, increasingly, to other agents." According to Kephardt, agents will evolve from facilitators to decisionmakers, while their degree of autonomy and responsibility increases with time. Ultimately, he predicts, transactions among software agents will become an essential, and perhaps even dominant, portion of the world economy.

To computer scientists, particularly specialists in artificial intelligence, agents are nothing new. Researchers have been trying to build prototype agents for at least 20 years. A number of fairly primitive versions are in commercial use today -- doing things like sorting e-mail and customizing web pages. But these agents, while useful, still rely on the initiative and programming ability of the user. A class of more advanced commercial agents called "bots" (e-slang for robot) are now being designed to reside on the Web and do things like compare prices for online retail items or disable viruses before they infect your computer. However, even these provide only a glimpse of the more intelligent versions yet to come. Patty Maes, an artificial intelligence guru and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts agents will eventually become "robust and adaptive, capable of learning from experience and responding to unforeseen situations with a repertoire of different methods." An ideal agent, she says, should sense the current state of its environment and act independently towards its goal.

Maes is a pioneer in an emerging field called "artificial life," that seeks to apply biological principles to networked devices. Artificial-life agents are truly autonomous, in that they program themselves. According to Maes, these autonomous agents will even undergo "artificial evolution," resulting in an electronic ecosystem housed in the next century's computer networks. True to Darwinian form, successful agents will survive and reproduce, while those that fail are purged.

Just how these autonomous e-markets would function in the environmental sector remains to be seen. Should a worldwide framework for emissions trading be established under the Kyoto Protocol, or some other analogous agreement, it's possible that agent-based systems could handle huge volumes of international transactions among industrial facilities. Caltech's Ledyard suggests autonomous e-markets might emerge in a hypothetical emissions trading program for mobile sources, for example, cars in an urban area. Furthermore, networked sensors could be employed to police the system and make sure reductions targets were achieved.

Trust and Security

Those who see the emergence of autonomous e-markets as just another example of technology run amuck have some legitimate concerns. After all, what's to stop a highly evolved agent from turning into a self-replicating virus? Furthermore, agents in an e-market are delegated with buying and selling commodities -- which means they have access to money. An agent could be subject to attempts to manipulate its buying decisions in favor of another, malicious user that in effect converts it to an online "e-zombie." This may sound like science fiction but the issues are real -- security concerns are critical and may never be completely resolved.

Another potential problem is trust: How can scientists ensure that agents will perform as instructed? Maes acknowledges that delegating responsibility always involves some loss of control -- whether the responsibility is passed on to a human or a machine. Nevertheless delegating responsibility is essential if efficiency is to be achieved. Building security into these systems, as well as some measure of flexibility to accommodate error, will be an ongoing challenge for scientists in the years to come.

Trust, Technology, and Society

The future of computing means many different things to different people. On a scientific level it represents a technical challenge to connect things. Technologists look to the future and envision innumerable PCs, sensors, microprocessors, handheld wireless devices, and even ordinary consumer items intimately connected throughout the world. To the ordinary person this prospect might elicit a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and fear -- for privacy, for security, and for social stability. Any talk of global networks and online toasters and some people start thinking about Big Brother and how maybe going back to the land isn't such a bad idea.

To speculate on the future of computing is to embrace uncertainty -- no one knows how the technical revolution will continue to unfold. Certainly innovation is exploding; one need only consider the impact of the Internet during the last five years to see that. But extrapolating to a world in which Internet connectivity permeates every aspect of modern life still requires a certain leap of faith. MIT's Gershenfeld says scientists working on ubiquitous systems are separated by an entrenched chasm: On the one side are theorists who think deeply about lifelike, adaptive systems but canÕt make anything that works. And on the other are technologists making functioning gadgets that donÕt scale up to ubiquitous proportions. "There's a lot of noise and chatter but almost no overlap at that essential boundary," he says.

The goal for the future will be to somehow bridge the theoretical possibilities with technological capability. Research focused on the goal of ubiquitous computing will be concerned with a number of important technical hurdles. For example, it's not at all clear how data flowing from trillions of networked "bit dribblers," meaning low-cost computational devices, will be routed through the Internet. And it's doubtful that the traffic can be managed on HTML; whole new Internet protocols will have to be devised. These problems arenÕt unsolvable, but they will require new ways of thinking about systems architecture.

And what of Big Brother? Is society ready for a pervasive system that surrounds its citizenry and monitors their day-to-day activities? Many citizens worry that ubiquitous networks will present new and emerging challenges to personal privacy. "Imagine putting a frozen pizza into a microwave that downloads cooking instructions from Pizza Hut," suggests Alan Davidson, staff council with the Council for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. "Is Pizza Hut going to track the server of that microwave? Will they find out where and when you bought the pizza, and are they logging this transaction? Suddenly they have a whole dossier of information -- a detailed record that describes your personal activities." In addressing these privacy matters, one of the greatest challenges will be finding ways to allow citizens to opt in or out of the system as it becomes more pervasive. It's not clear how that's going to happen, but it will be important in order to prevent a public backlash.

Some scientists, for example Bill Joy, the cofounder and chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, suggest that our most powerful 21st century technologies, for example robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology (meaning functioning devices and machines measured in billionths of meters), could threaten to make humans an endangered species. (See attached article by Joy, "Why the future doesn't need us.") Joy predicts that as technology advances, humans will increasingly delegate responsibility to intelligent machines able to make their own decisions and, referring to the writings of Theodore Kaczynski (better known as the Unibomber) wonders whether these same machines might not reduce humans to "the status of domestic animals."

There's no doubt, as Joy acknowledges, that this represents an extreme view of the power of technology. The question to ask is whether this view ignores social forces that might co-evolve with technology and help to shape its path to the future. Speaking to this more moderate view, Xerox's John Seely Brown suggests that the public and society need to become engaged in the debate over technology in order to find out where the brakes are and when it's appropriate to apply them.

Ultimately the future of computing could greatly benefit society if its evolution is harmonious with the needs of the people. Consider the elderly able to live at home while their health is monitored remotely, children learning from interactive environments, and even people in developing countries able to harness information technology to boost their own economies. Cherry Murray, a senior vice president at Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies, suggests technology could be a democratizer. "Various countries around the world suppress democracy by withholding information," she says. "But it will be increasingly difficult to withhold information in the future. The technology could help to bring us together as one civilization. And that's thinking on the positive side."

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