Chapter 52 10.3 Rooms that bite and rooms that don't bite

Wither's complex is a co-evolutionary ecosystem of machines.Each device is an organism that responds to stimuli and communicates with other devices.Cooperation will pay off.Going it alone, the vast majority of electronic devices will become a mess and die due to idleness.And together, they form a colony, thoughtful and strong.What each tiny device lacks in depth is made up for by a shared network.The collective influence of the shared network spreads throughout the building, and its tentacles even reach humans. Embedded intelligence and ecological mobility will not only be owned by houses and halls, but also by streets, stores and towns.Weiser uses words as an example.Writing, he says, is a technology that is ubiquitously embedded in our environment.Words are everywhere in urban and rural areas, everywhere.They passively wait for people to read them.Imagine, Weiser said, when computing and connectivity are as embedded in the environment as writing is, and street signs communicate with car navigation systems or maps in your hand (when street names change, all maps change accordingly); Streetlights in parking lots come on before you even enter the lot; when you check out a billboard, it sends you more product information, while letting advertisers know which part of the street is getting the most inquiries.The environment becomes lively, responsive and adaptable.It responds not only to you, but to every other unit plugged in.

One definition of a coevolutionary ecology is that a collection of organisms acts as its own environment.In this colorful world of orchid bushes, ant colonies and seaweed beds, there is abundance and mystery everywhere.In this play, each creature acts as a secondary and extra in someone else's play, but also plays a leading role in its own play on the same stage.Every set is as alive and watery as the actors.The fate of the mayfly, therefore, depends on the full play of the nearby frogs, trout, alder, water spiders, and other creatures of the stream.Every living thing serves as an environment for other living things.The same is true for machines, which will perform on the stage of co-evolution.

The refrigerators available on the market today are a pretentious one.You bring it home and it thinks it's the only appliance in the house.It can neither learn from other machines nor tell them anything.A clock on the wall will tell you the time, but not a word to its kind.Each device only has its buyers in its eyes, but it has never considered that if it can cooperate with other devices around it, it can serve people better. On the other hand, for dull machines, the machine ecology will enhance their limited capabilities.Chips embedded in books and chairs have only the intelligence of ants.These chips are not supercomputers; they can be built now.But with distributed capabilities, when ants-like units are clustered and interconnected, they are elevated to a kind of swarm intelligence.Quantitative change leads to qualitative change.

Yet collective efficiency comes at a price.Ecological intelligence would work against a newcomer, just as tundra ecology would work against any newcomer to the Arctic.Ecosystems require you to have local knowledge.Only the natives know where to find big mushrooms in the woods.To hunt wallabies in the Australian outback, you'll need a bush-infested old fritter as your guide. Where there is an ecosystem, there are people who are well versed in local affairs.The stranger can cope with the unfamiliar wild to some extent, but to develop further or to survive a crisis, he definitely needs local expertise.Gardeners often surprised academic experts by introducing crops that would not have grown in the area, and as local experts they tempered the soil and climate nearby.

Engagement with the natural environment is integral to local knowledge.Mutual improvement between a room full of mechanical organisms requires similar local knowledge.The haughty old refrigerator had the advantage of treating everyone equally, hosts and guests alike.And in a room with an active colony of intelligence, the guest is at a disadvantage compared to the host.Every room is different, even every phone is different.The new telephone is just one node in a larger organism -- an organism that connects furnaces, cars, televisions, computers, chairs, entire buildings, and behaves according to the totality of what's going on in the room. summary.The behavior of each item depends on what the person who uses it the most uses it for.To guests, this elusive monster of the room seems out of control.

Adaptable technology refers to technology that can adapt to the local environment.Network logic enables regionality and locality.Or to put it another way, overall behavior necessarily includes local diversity.We've seen this shift.Try using someone else's "smart" phone: it's either too smart or not.Did you press "9" to call the outside line?Can you press a key at will to connect to a line?How do you (halo!) do call forwarding?Only the owner knows.The local knowledge required to use the full capabilities of a video recorder is even greater.Just because you can preprogram your own VCR to record reruns of The Prisoner by no means means you can also operate your friend's VCR.

The electronic ecologies of rooms and buildings will vary; so will the appliances in the rooms, which will all be composed of smaller, distributed collections of components.No one knows the technical characteristics of my office as well as I do; nor can I apply other people's technology as well as my own.Computers became assistants and toasters became pets. If designed properly, the coffee machine can "feel" the urgency of impatient customers when they use it, and thus use the "novice mode" by default.This "Mr. Coffee Machine" will only provide five basic general-purpose functions that even elementary school children can understand how to operate.

But I've found that this emerging ecology can be scary in its infancy to the uninitiated.Computers are the starting point and destination of all devices, and all unfamiliar and complex machines will be presented to us through computers.It doesn't matter how much you know about a particular brand of computer.When you borrow someone else's computer, it's like you're using their toothbrush.The moment you turn on your friend's computer, you will find: familiar components, strange arrangement (why are they doing this?); you think you know this place, but you can't find the north at all.It seems familiar, but it has its own order.And the horror that ensues - you're... peering into someone else's mind!

This intrusion goes both ways.The "narrow-field" intelligence of PC ecology is so private, so subtle, and so precise, that it is alerted by any perturbation—whether removing a pebble, bending a blade of grass, or moving a document. "Someone broke into my computing space! I know it!" There are rooms that don't bite and rooms that bite.A biting room will bite intruders.A no-bite room takes visitors to safety, away from areas where real harm can be done.A room that doesn't bite will entertain guests.People are respected for how well trained their computers are and how ingenious their computer ecosystems are.Others gain notoriety for how unruly their machines are.In the future, there will surely be some forgotten places in big corporations where no one wants to work or hang around because the computing facilities are left unattended and become rude, paranoid, difficult to get along with (despite spiritual ), but no one has the time to domesticate or reeducate it.

Of course, there is a powerful counterforce maintaining the unity of the environment.As Danny Hillis pointed out to me: "The reason we create bionic environments to replace natural ones is because we want them to be constant and predictable. We used to have a computer editor that would allow everyone There were different interfaces. So everyone set up their own interface. Then we realized that it was a bad idea, because we couldn't use other people's terminals. So we went back to the old way: a shared interface, a common culture. This is also true is one of the things that brings us together as human beings."

Machines can never develop entirely on their own, but they will become more aware of other machines.To survive in a Darwinian marketplace, their designers must recognize that these machines inhabit an environment of other machines.Together they form a history.And in the artificial ecosystems of the future, they must share what they know.