Friends and colleagues,
The L.A. Times column by Gary Chapman, below, starts off sounding a bit
like techno-innovational hype. But as I read on, my impression
is that as the technological changes he reports unfold, the
social and political implications could be pretty vast. And, of
course, in the U.S. (and also most everywhere else in the world),
there are no institutional mechanisms in place for broad
societal discussion of such trends, or opportunities for
broadly informed, democratic social oversight or guidance of them.
E.g., as the world is arranged now, such innovations are driven in the
first instance by large corporations responding to profit
and strategic-positioning imperatives, and will over time
be shaped also by consumer-involved market interactions.
But the results could have sweeping, macro-level social and
political implications that are completely ignored during our
countless micro interactions as consumers or producers.
If there are overall social and political consequences people don't
like, there can be some opportunity after the fact for
political discussion, intervention, or remediation. But
(as David Collinridge argued two decades ago in _The
Social Control of Technology_, or as Langdon Winner
explains in _The Whale and the Reactor_ [1986]) "after the
fact" the opportunities for influence are much diminished by the
already-accomplished technological, institutional, and social
changes and accompanying sunk costs.
It could be otherwise (as I argue in _Democracy and Technology_
[1995]), but not until we are able to put in place effective
democratic institutions for deliberating about and influencing
technological developments as they are incubated and unfold,
rather than "after the fact."
Cheers to all,
Dick Sclove
(please see Gary Chapman's column, below, beneath
my own signature file)
*******************************************************************
Dick Sclove
Founder & Research Director
The Loka Institute, P.O. Box 355, Amherst, MA 01004-0355, USA
Web: http://www.loka.org
E-mail: [log in to unmask] (personal)
[log in to unmask] (Loka Institute)
Tel. +1-413-559-5860 Fax +1-413-559-5811
"Making science and technology responsive to democratically
decided social and environmental concerns"
*******************************************************************
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 07:29:00 -0600
From: Gary Chapman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: L.A. Times column, 1/4/99
[snip]
Below is my Los Angeles Times column for Monday, January 4, 1999.
[snip]
As always, please feel to pass this column on to others, but please retain
the copyright notice.
Best regards,
-- Gary
Gary Chapman
Director
The 21st Century Project
LBJ School of Public Affairs
Drawer Y, University Station
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78713
(512) 263-1218
(512) 471-1835 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/21cp
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Monday, January 4, 1999
The Los Angeles Times
DIGITAL NATION
The Future Lies Beyond the Box
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved
Reporters and columnists attempting to sum up developments in the high-tech
field in 1998, or speculating on the big stories for this year, are all
ticking off what one would expect: the boom in Internet commerce, the
Microsoft antitrust trial, highflying Internet stocks, the resurgence of
Apple Computer, the merger of America Online and Netscape Communications,
the rise of open-source software such as the Linux operating system, and
the year 2000 bug, among other notable subjects.
The interesting developments I saw in 1998 were mostly in research
laboratories, and they pointed to a profound rethinking of how networks
operate and information is circulated.
The buzzwords to watch this year and beyond are "embedded" or "ubiquitous"
computing and "distributed" computing, terms now used by computer
scientists to describe a reorienting of how we'll use networking and
information technologies in the future. This new paradigm, whose building
blocks only began to appear in 1998, will be the next big thing in
computing.
Embedded or ubiquitous computing refers first of all to the trend of
putting computational and networking capabilities into devices and services
other than the familiar "screen-keyboard-box" of the personal computer.
We're seeing a huge shift among technology companies that are looking
beyond the PC toward a proliferation of hand-held network devices such as
3Com's PalmPilot, a new networking cellular phone from Microsoft and
Qualcomm, a promised palmtop system from Apple and electronic books from
Rocketbook and Softbook, among other related products.
Compaq's Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, which the company
acquired when it bought Digital Equipment Corp., has even produced a
working prototype of a hand-held computer that runs Linux.
At the Internet Society convention in Geneva in July, I frequently heard
the slogan, "IP on everything, everything on IP." IP stands for Internet
Protocol, the basic data standard that allows information to be "seen" or
passed around on the Internet. With everything on IP and IP on everything,
nearly all our common, everyday devices will be "smart" and "on" the
Internet: cars, refrigerators, household appliances and light switches,
manufacturing tools, TVs, cameras, sensors and even smart cards in our
wallets or purses.
In order to get all these devices to talk to each other and to be
identified on the network, we need a new standard of software that's small,
platform-independent and ubiquitous itself. Sun Microsystems' solution is
called Jini (http://java .sun.com/products/jini/), which was previewed for
developers in 1998 and will be formally announced Jan. 25 in New York.
Jini is based on Java, the programming language that runs on a "virtual
machine" that can be included with any operating system. Jini-enabled
devices contain "agents," small segments of software code that tell other
Jini machines what they do, where they are and how they operate. A
Jini-powered house, for example, would show up in a Web browser or on a PC
desktop displaying its capabilities, such as the ability to turn lights on
or off, inventory its refrigerator or cupboards, set the temperature, check
phone messages, etc.
This is how embedded computation and distributed computing intersect:
Machine intelligence shifts from general-purpose computing, such as in a
PC, to device-specific intelligence, and the network itself becomes smart
as an aggregate of billions of devices performing specific tasks and
sharing information.
The network architecture may change too. Instead of the familiar
client-server model we use today, distributed computing allows a
peer-to-peer architecture, which means that there's no longer any need for
large, centralized computers running huge operating systems such as Windows
NT. Jini resources can "see" one another without having to be switched
through a server, and Jini agent software can run in under a megabyte of
memory space.
Microsoft is aware of the threat this model poses to its core software
products. It has its own version of the Jini approach, called the
Millennium Project. Lucent Technologies has one called Inferno
(http://www.lucent-inferno.com/), and General Magic, in Sunnyvale, Calif.,
has a product called Odyssey
(http://www.generalmagic.com/technology/odyssey.html).
This is where the money and research are headed these days. Another
interesting and related development is under investigation at Caltech in
Pasadena, a program called the Infospheres Project
(http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/), directed by Caltech computer science
professor K. Mani Chandy.
The Infospheres Project, funded by the U.S. Air Force and the National
Science Foundation, grew out of the tragedy of TWA Flight 800 near Long
Island, N.Y., in 1996, Chandy says. After the airliner blew up, a large
array of institutions and people needed to talk to one another -- the FBI,
hospitals, TWA, the Coast Guard, families of the victims, etc. The
technological problem became how these people could communicate without
knowing one another or knowing how to get in touch with one another in
advance.
The thrust of the Infospheres Project has been to develop a new mode of
information distribution, which Chandy calls "content-based" addressing
instead of "address-based" addressing. In other words, people who need to
communicate would be able to pass information to one another based on the
content of their messages rather than on knowing the precise address of
their correspondents.
To accomplish this task, the Infospheres Project also uses Java agents,
software that organizes information into classes and then searches for
matches on a network. A user who wants to buy a product online, for
example, might use such an agent to search for sellers and have all
potential sellers with a match for the product report back instead of
requiring the user to search individual Web sites.
Using the Infospheres Project software (a trial version will be available
later this month), users will be able to find information not by using
Internet addresses but by creating conditions, or parameters, for agents
that will search the network for appropriate responses. In March, the
project will launch an experimental model in the San Francisco Bay Area
with both end users and vendors.
"I think this is going to be the metaphor for the future," Chandy says.
Most other computer scientists seem to agree -- the phrase "post-PC era" is
heard often among researchers now.
The challenge for this new approach will be how to make the ubiquitous and
distributed models of computing reliable, safe, secure and transparent to
users. Privacy will also be vastly more complicated -- the present model of
online privacy, which is dependent on the "informed consent" of consumers,
will get significantly more opaque if we have millions of devices
constantly communicating all around us without our direct control or
knowledge. There is also the interesting question of whether future
software agents will bear any of the legal rights or responsibilities we
attach to individuals.
Right now, cyberspace is typically viewed by the public as something
glimpsed through a screen, the "window" of a PC monitor. Even that level of
abstraction, however, is about to expand beyond most people's imaginations
as the ideas incubating in research labs begin to migrate into our daily
lives. As we might expect, given the rapid technological change we've seen
in the last five years, things are about to get very different from what we
know now.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of
Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is [log in to unmask]
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