Surrounded And Outnumbered 
By Don Barker

In 1965, NBC launched Get Smart, which spoofed the 60's spy craze and James Bond in particular. The most memorable image from the show is bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart using his shoe phone to call his "Chief."  

I remembered that show with some amusement when I recently came across Neil Gershenfeld's new book When Things Start to Think, which features a picture of a "smart" shoe on the cover.

Nike is supporting Gershenfeld's "Things That Think" research consortium at MIT's famous Media Lab to develop "intelligent" shoes. The idea, I gathered from the book, is to create a shoe capable of generating power and containing the equivalent of today's laptop computer. (I suppose taking off your shoe to phone home won't be an initial feature.)

The "Things That Think" (TTT) consortium is working at making computing and computation ubiquitous but less obtrusive, providing "...information that you need where you want it, when you want it, and without you needing to manage it."

The first decade of the Media Lab was devoted to the recognition that content transcends the means to physically represent it. In other words, these researchers foresaw that print and images would evolve into "bits" in the rapidly emerging world of digital media.

"In the second decade, more and more of the work of the Media Lab revolves around the recognition that capable bits need capable atoms," Gershenfeld argues in his book. He believes that in order to bring computation closer to people it is now necessary to revisit and revise the physical ways atoms represent content (bits).

In practice, this means developing a range of new computation devices that come in almost any form (except traditional personal computers, of course). So, in addition to shoes and clothing, other things like jewelry, furniture, carpets, walls, and cars are being endowed with intelligence by the TTT consortium and their industrial sponsors, such as Nike, HP, Motorola, Microsoft, Fedex and Disney. They are also developing the communication protocols and transports required to connect these smart devices into networked systems. In the end, they hope to create an environment where, "Your shoes should be retrieving the day's personalized news from the carpet before you even have time to take off your coat."

In essence, the scientists at TTT are attempting to move computation away from the digital world, which is how computers operate, and toward an enhanced analog world that is similar to how humans function.  In Gershenfeld's vision of the future, VCR's never flash annoying 12:00 symbols because they automatically check with atomic clocks on the Internet to reset their own time after a power failure.  Coffee machines monitor your consumption patterns and the temperature of the coffee in your cup so a warm pot is ready for you at the appropriate time.  You don't have to go in search of a phone jack to plug in your laptop computer when you want your email; instead, your wristwatch, eyeglasses, or even a tabletop or wall display your messages upon command.

Before you dismiss the idea of ubiquitous and unobtrusive intelligent computation as unrealistic or absurd, keep in mind Moore's Law (named after Gordon Moore, the inventor of the integrated circuit and a previous chairman of Intel). Moore's Law states that approximately every two years the number of transistors on the same size chip doubles. This means that the power and speed of computing doubles about every two years, while the cost remains about the same.

Ray Kurzweil, in his new book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, masterfully illustrates the long-term implications of this exponential growth for machine intelligence. Kurzweil, who played a key role in the invention of character and voice recognition, plots this accelerating trend out until the year 2100. After factoring in other contributing trends, Kurzweil predicts that a single $1,000 computer will have the equivalent computation capabilities of a human by 2020 and the combined computation power of all humans by 2060.

Although it remains to be seen if chip technology, or its offspring such as optical, nanotechnology, or quantum computing, can maintain that pace of acceleration for the next 100 years, Kurzweil makes some convincing arguments based on current research.

Of course, there is also the question of whether software development will keep pace with advances in computational power and speed. But the defeat of the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasaprov by IBM's supercomputer "Deep Blue" does indicate that ever increasing computing power is helping to overcome the limitations of software in delivering more intelligent machines.

Patrick Winston, former director (for a remarkable 25 years) of the MIT AI Lab, recently told me that, "...it is not outrageous to imagine that discoveries [in artificial intelligence] analogous to [finding DNA in biology] will take place in next decade or so." Such a discovery would certainly shorten even Kurzweil's optimistic estimates of the arrival of machine intelligence. So, when Gershenfeld and Kurzweil predict intelligent computation will be imbedded in our clothing and jewelry, we should take the prospect seriously.

I also recently spoke with Rodney Brooks, inventor of such extraordinary robots as COG and the current director of MIT's AI Lab. Although research projects run the gamut from robotics to information "survivability," Brooks says they too are working on "...intelligent spaces...[where] instead of you having to go to the machine the machine is where you are and you don't think of it as a machine...you have computation all around."

He gave an insightful example of how a professor might be talking with a student in the hallway about a particular subject that required the display of a chart to fully explain the concept. Instead of heading for a computer, the professor just gestures and a nearby wall displays the graph, automatically modifying the chart as the professor, or student, suggest changes.

Unlike the future envisioned by science fiction writers, such as William Gibson's original "cyberspace" in which humanity and artificial artifacts interact, we are much more likely to see computation entering our physical world in ever-increasing amounts and places, according to researchers such as Gershenfeld, Kurzweil, and Brooks. Proponents of nanotechnology, the science of automatically building matter atom by atom, even believe that it eventually will be possible to remake our physical world in any image, a sort of "virtual realty" without the "virtual." Trillions of "nanobots" could, in theory, intelligently reorganize our surroundings based on our needs and tastes. For example, instantly changing our bedroom to a kitchen when we awaken in the morning.

This may all sound a bit way out, but one thing is for sure: As we move into the 21st century we will no doubt be surrounded and outnumbered by intelligent agents and computation in general. So, as computation evolves and multiples around us, we should get smart now about planning and controlling it.

I hear my shoe phone ringing, so this 007.10 signing off. You can reach me at don@donbarker.com or visit me at http://www.donbarker.com. Just remember, I'm the man who lives the life of danger and to everyone I meet I stay a (bit) stranger.

Don Barker is the senior editor of PCAI Magazine.