Slashdot Mirror
Digital Lifestyle
Gingerman writes "The BBC is running a story about a full automated lifestyle centre in Wokingham UK. The centre has everything from the home to the office and includes shops too." It's
a little thin on details, but its a mix of practical things that could
be around the corner, and stuff that may be a little further down a 6 lane interstate.
Too bad that a big assumption of the project is that providers of information on the web want to provide it in a format that is useful to an automated agent, when in reality they seem to do all they can to stop you making useful tools like these automated agents. Despite the development of things like XML, JINI and WSDL - all technologies designed to minimise the amount of customisation needed between strangers - the people who have this type of info aren't exactly jumping on those technologies.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
--Chag
The UK has such a high cost of living (in part due to the socialistic policies of Tony Blair) with a DSL connection costing $70/month (single user) its hard to see how the UK can compete with other high tech countries such as Singapore.
The tone of the article just reminds me so much of those 1950's visions of future houses that would be fully automated and have robots to clean the dishes and wash the cats. There's just about one thing articles like this are good for, and thats for cheap laughs in about 50 years time.
There are times when I want nothing more than to get away from anything computer related. I enjoy fly fishing for example. Just a rod,reel, and hopefully, some fish. I work on computers all damned day, and when I go home, the LAST thing I want is to have to interact with yet another computer. The tech is really cool, and I like the idea of seperating each into areas, work, home, etc...but what happens if you want to get away from it all? If this is their vision of the future, (and what else can it be?) then I hope they allow for those of us that don't *WANT* to be tied into the system all the time. Ok, now mod at your discretion.
Sent from your iPad.
It's five o'clock in the morning. The alarm beeps to life and a soft female voice with an American accent comes over the speakers:
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early so you can change into your grey suit before the Copyright Police arrive to detain you. I've alerted them to the unauthorized copies of several Universal film properties I detected on your portable drive after you docked it last night, as required by the Intellectual Property Theft Act of 2009. Would you like me to play you some light rock as you get dressed? Current prices are $4.99 per half hour."
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Fast forward to 2002. The company has scaled back their operations considerably. New market research data shows that there is almost nobody who would want to pay to live in a fully automated apartment. Hopeless companies no longer have stock valuations based more in ignorance than in profit potential. The Era of High Tech Toys has passed us by. I'm not sure what HP, "home of the earnings warning," is thinking, but something tells me that their cool new automated homes are not going to pave the way back to profitability.
~wally
This is all very cool stuff (for those of us who could benefit from this kind of technology). I am really looking forward to this kind of thing. I know I spend way too much time doing things that could be [more] automated or completely eliminated. But there are two barriers that will keep it from happening in the near future.
In order for this kind of lifestyle to be possible, many large (and small) companies across a wide variety of industries must adopt and integrate the technology to make this happen. Adoption of new technologies is slow enough by itself. How many of us work in companies where Win98 and NT4 are the default desktop OS's, despite the availability of new, better versions? And this is a technology that's well understood and relatively painless to upgrade. (Yes, I said relatively painless, not without pain.)
Integration between two or more companies takes much longer than adoption within a single organization. Remember the B2B craze? After all the fallout, there's not much of it left.
Companies exist to make money, not adopt and implement new technologies. New means risky, unproven, and that risk makes executives and shareholders nervous. And some of the things involved in creating this "digital lifestyle" are a hard sell, from a profitability standpoint. How do you convince the board or executive team that it makes good business sense to invest in developing a service that lets people know when their bus is going to arrive at the bus stop? So they change at a slow pace to reduce the perceived risk.
This is some amazing work, frankly I'm surprised at how much can be done just with today's technology! I'm really looking forward to the time when it can make a significant difference in the quality of my life.
-Thomas