Ubiquitous Computing
Sterling: Let's move right into that. Topic No. 3: Ubicomp. You're beginning to see some of this popping up. When you start having these little gizmos, you know you're moving in the right direction from where it goes from hand waving to where it really hurts people. Ubiciomp bites man.
I think that the first area is traffic monitoring and traffic rings. The mayor of London OK'd the installation of traffic monitoring cameras that take snapshots of your license plate. You get a ticket. That's OK. We don�t want to run people down. But what worries me is ubicomp mission creep. Now you�ve got a database of everybody and her sister's license plate and what they're doing downtown. I don�t know if any of you Austinites have noticed the bloom of video cameras. What is our city doing with this video? How do you leave town without them knowing? How do you really know when you're driving across town to have a little rendezvous with your boyfriend that your husband wont call up and ask where did my wife's license plate go? It's a ubicomp problem. Its an Orwellian ubicomp problem.
It's sexy. The upcoming war between palm tops and cell phone gadgets will be interesting. It's weird. I'ts one of the most exciting places of concurrent technological development: Handhelds trying to become phones and phones trying to become palm tops.
Media Diet March 14, 2003
