Chapter 51 10.2 Invisible intelligence

My 1994 prediction: Smart offices will come before smart homes.Business is by its information-intensive nature—reliant on machines and constantly adapting to change—so “magic” that is useless in the home can bring significant economic benefits in the office.Time at home is usually considered leisure time, so the little time saved through network intelligence is far less valuable than the little time gathered at work.Internet-connected computers and phones are must-haves in the office today; the next step is connected lighting and furniture. The personality element used in the first user-friendly Macintosh was invented at the Xerox Corporation labs in Palo Alto, California, but was sadly underutilized.Taking a fall, learning a lesson, Palo Alto Research Center is now going all out to expand another futuristic and potentially profitable concept brewing in the lab.The head of the center, Mark Weiser, is young and cheerful.He pioneered the idea of ​​the office as a superorganism—a networked creature made of many interconnected parts.

The glass-walled offices at the Palo Alto Research Center sit on a hill in the Bay Area overlooking Silicon Valley.When I visited Wither, he was wearing a bright yellow shirt with bright red overalls.He was always laughing, like creating the future is a very funny thing, and I was infected and immersed in it.I sit on the couch.Sofas are an essential piece of furniture in a hacker's den, even one as stylish as a Xerox.Wither was so restless he couldn't sit still; he stood in front of a large floor-to-ceiling whiteboard, his hands waving, and a marker in one.His waving hands seem to say, as you will soon see, this is very complicated.Weiser drew on the whiteboard like a diagram of an ancient Roman army.Below the picture are hundreds of small units.Above that are a dozen medium-sized units.Top location is a great unit.Weiser's queue diagram is a field of "house organisms".

Wither told me that what he really wants is a swarm of tiny agents.A hundred small objects all over the office have a rough and vague awareness of each other, of themselves, and of me.My room has become a huge colony of semi-smart chips.All you need, he says, is to embed a chip in each book to track where in the room the book was left, when it was last opened, and which page it was on.The chip will even have a dynamic copy of the chapter table of contents, which will connect itself to the computer's database when you first bring the book into the room.Books thus have social attributes.All the information carriers that are stored on the shelf, such as books and video tapes, are embedded with a cheap chip that can communicate with each other, telling you where they are and what they are.

In an eco-office filled with such items, the room would know where I am.Obviously it (they?) should turn the lights off if I'm not in the room."Instead of having light switches in every room, people carry their own light switches," Weiser said. "When you want to turn on a light, a smart switch in your pocket will turn the light on in the room you're in, or dim it to the desired level. You don't have to have a dimmer in the room, you have one in your hand, a personalized light control. The same goes for the volume adjustment. Everyone in the auditorium has their own volume control. The volume is often either too loud or too low; Use the controller in your pocket like a vote. The sound finally freezes on an average.”

In Weiser's smart office, ubiquitous smart things form a hierarchical structure.At the bottom of the hierarchy is an army of microbes that make up the room's context-aware network.They report information such as location and purpose to their immediate superiors.These frontline soldiers are cheap, disposable little chips that attach to notebooks, booklets, and smart stickers that allow them to take notes.You buy them by the dozen, just like you would buy a notebook or memory stick.They are most effective when grouped together. Next up are ten or so medium-sized displays (slightly larger than a breadbox), mounted on furniture and appliances for more frequent and direct interaction with the occupants of the office.Plugged into the superorganism of the smart house, my chair recognizes me the moment I sit down, without being mistaken for someone else.In the morning, when I sit down, it will remember what I usually do in the morning.Then it will assist me with my daily work, wake up the appliances that need to be warmed up, and prepare for the day's plan.

Every room also has at least one electronic display, a meter wide or larger—like a window, a painting, or a computer/TV screen.In Weiser's world of ambient computing, big screens in every room feature the smartest non-humans.You talk to it, point and write on it, and it can understand it.Large screens can display video, text, graphics, or other types of information.It is interconnected with other objects in the room, knows exactly what they are supposed to do, and faithfully displays them on the screen.In this way, I have two ways to interact with the book: flipping through the physical book, or flipping through the image of the book on the screen.

Every room becomes a computing environment.The adaptive nature of the computer blends into the background until it is barely visible, yet omnipresent. "The most profound technologies are those that cannot be seen," Weiser said. “They weave themselves into the minutiae of everyday life until they become part of it.” The technique of writing descends from the elite, lowers itself, fades from our attention.These days, we barely notice the ubiquitous words on fruit labels, movie subtitles, etc.Motors started out as huge, proud beasts; but since then, they've shrunk into tiny things that are incorporated (and forgotten) into most mechanical devices.George Gilder wrote in his book "The Microcosm": "The development of the computer can be regarded as a process of collapse. Those parts that were once suspended above the level of the microcosm, one by one, entered the invisible level, It disappears from the sight of the naked eye." The adaptive technology brought to us by the computer also appeared large, bold and focused when it first appeared.But as chips, motors, and sensors collapse into the realm of the invisible, their flexibility survives, creating a distributed environment.Entities disappear, what remains is their collective behavior.We interact with this collective behavior—this superorganism or this ecosystem—and the whole room becomes an adaptive cocoon.

Gilder added: "Computers will eventually become the size of a pinhead and be able to respond to human requests. In this form, human intelligence will be transmitted to any tool or device, and to every corner around it." So far from dehumanizing the world, the triumph of computers will make the environment more subservient to human desires. "We are not creating machines, but mechanized environments in which we can integrate what we have learned. We are extending our lives to the surrounding environment." "You know the point of virtual reality is to put yourself in a computer world," Mark Weiser said. "And what I want to do is just the opposite. I want to put the computer world around you, outside of you. In the future, you will be surrounded by the intelligence of computers." This kind of mental jump is wonderful.In order to experience a computer-generated world, we have to don goggles and bodysuits; all we have to do is open a door to be surrounded by computing and soak up its magic all the time.

Once you enter a room dominated by the network, all the smart rooms notify each other.The big picture on the wall becomes the portal into my room and other people's room.For example, I heard that there is a book worth reading.I was doing a data search in my house and my screen said Ralph had one in his office, on the bookshelf behind his desk, and it was full of company bought books that had been read in the last week.Alice also has a copy in her cubicle, next to the computer manual, a book she paid for herself and no one has read yet.I chose Alice and sent her a loan request online.She said yes.Once I personally went to Alice's room to retrieve the book, it changed its appearance to my liking to match the other books in my room. (I like to have the content that I fold over the footer show up first.) The book's built-in record also notes the book's new location and notifies the owner's database.It is unlikely that this book will ever go away like the vast majority of borrowed books in the past.

In a smart room, if the stereo is turned on, the phone ringer will be turned up slightly; and when you answer the call, the stereo will automatically turn down the volume.The answering machine in the office knows your car isn't in the lot, so it tells the caller you haven't arrived.When you pick up a book, it lights up the lamp above your usual reading chair.The TV will let you know that a certain novel you read has a movie version this week.Everything is interconnected.Clocks listen to the weather; fridges check the time and order milk before they run out; books remember where they are.

In Xerox’s experimental offices, Weiser writes, “doors open only to those wearing the correct badge; people are greeted in the room by name; a place to stay; the front desk knows exactly where everyone is; a computer terminal learns the preferences of the person sitting in front of it; the appointment log registers itself." But what if I don't want everyone in the department to know which room I'm in? What should I do?The original staff of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ubiquitous computing experiment often left the office to escape the endless calls.They feel like being in jail is always being found.An online culture cannot thrive without privacy technologies.Privacy technologies such as personal encryption or anti-forgery digital signatures are rapidly developing (see subsequent chapters).The anonymity of chaos will also ensure privacy.