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Marc Andreessen Describes Vision of 'Ambient Computing' (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is one of the biggest investors in technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, he spoke about how he envisions the future of computing. It's essentially an extension on the idea of the "Internet of Things." He thinks mobile phones will begin to be replaced in just 10 years. "The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting. By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project." Within 20 years, he expects most new physical objects to have some sort of chip implanted within them. "The end state is fairly obvious — every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet." The term for this is "ambient computing." There will obviously be a transition period — perhaps the so-called internet of things is just an early phase of that transition. But with powerful chips and sensors becoming incredibly cheap, Andreessen's scenario seems possible. I guess it's time to get cracking on those security and privacy concerns.
Bullshit!
At the bottom of the
And when that happens, expect trolling and hacking to become extremely serious, no intent involved felonies. If a troll messes with my house and I get robbed, I want the SOB put away for life. Literally. You mess with people, your lulz should get you not one iota of mercy. Expect if we ever get halfway to this that countries that treat it lightly will be lucky if all they suffer is sanctions.
...cofounder of what....?
Come on. How is this visionary at all? This is nothing but stating the blatantly obvious. OF COURSE you idiotic freaks will wire up every possible molecule, including yourselves.
The end state is indeed obvious (and aptly named, I might add). Ever see the borg on TV's Star Trek? That's you. Assuming you don't extinctify yourselves before that, which I'm hoping you will.
Ambient computing was defined by Mark Weiser in 1991 at HP Labs- and a lot of ideas were implemented there. Too bad whats her name destroyed innovation at HP.
There won't be any "internet doorknobs" in this house in 20 years time. Nor in 99% of homes around the world.
Even if they care the available off the shelf standard parts used in modern systems is too complex to fully secure, combine this with ubiquitous always on wireless....
why do even technically qualified people people seem to want to actively buy into what amounts to the pre-fail opening scene of either dystopic or apocalyptic scifi moves?
There is already a domain where ubiquitous integration of high complexity capabilities into virtually all materials with room for them is a reality.
We call it "Biology". And, in my professional capacity as a fungus, let me remind you that you'd be fucking insane to want your computers to go down that path.
It's impressive that machines made of meat work at all; but that doesn't change the fact that they are tottering heaps of uncontrolled complexity, riddled with pathogens and parasites, kept alive only because they are (sometimes) more fault-tolerant than they are faulty; and because the various microorganism militias are too busy fighting assorted cryptic metabolic battles and it is possible to enter alliances of convenience with some of them, if you get lucky.
People have done a terrible enough job keeping a bunch of loosely-linked deterministic finite state machines from descending into a putrid jungle of malware that inspires comparison to unpleasant biological outcomes. You want to add more; and link them more tightly? Have fun with that.
Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done.
The more complex a system, the easier it is to disrupt. Last week we lost power one evening for a couple of hours and my young daughter didn't know what to do. She couldn't understand why nothing except her iPad would work. No TV, no computer, no Internet, no music, no texting, no contact with anyone not physically in her presence. But at least she could access the refrigerator and her room.
If, as suggested in the summary, "every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet." then she wouldn't be able open a door or even enter or exit the house without approval from some server. Lack of power or a lack of connectivity would be a serious impediment to simply living in a house. Would all these things be controlled from a house server? Is everyone going to become a sysop? And think what a hacker could do with access to the house server. Or a burglar.
Or am I misunderstanding how this would all work?
every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project." Within 20 years, he expects most new physical objects to have some sort of chip implanted within them.
That sounds like a hacker's playground to me.
DEFCON is going to get more and more fun the closer we get to that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can't take the pronouncements of "visionary" tech gurus whose own companies didn't even stay relevant for ten years. If Elon Musk or some Russian guy from Google starts talking about ambient computing I'll consider it might really happen, but "one-hit-wonder" shit heads like Andreesen, Shuttleworth, Cuban, etc. hold about as much weight as some random slashdot post with a low user id.
That line edited for the summary (and people say editors don't do anything) actually goes like this:
"The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting.
By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project," he told the Telegraph.
"Hypothetically you walk upto a wall, sit at a table and [talk to] an earpiece or eyeglasses to make a call. The term is ambient or ubiquitous computing."
If tables, walls etc. have screens or projectors - why special earpieces or glasses?
If special glasses are ubiquitous - who needs screens in tables and walls? Wouldn't empty and clean flat surfaces be far more useful then?
And what's the use of a chip in a chair? To tell you that it is occupied or not? Wouldn't a single camera in the room do that and more?
Article further gives examples such as:
Pharmaceutical companies transporting drugs or vaccines need to constantly monitor temperature;
logistics or delivery companies track their fleet of vehicles over long distances;
and perishable food companies need to monitor internal temperature and humidity of trucks to check if their goods are spoiling.
None of that is "Internet of Things" or "ambient or ubiquitous computing" nor would those examples benefit from chips and sensors on every single item that is being transported in those trucks.
Why then all those additional sensors?
Well... cause it would be expensive to make dedicated case by case monitoring systems to replace somewhat manual (but cheap) solutions already employed. As in, there's an employee doing that right now.
So the solution is to cover EVERYTHING with sensors instead.
Thus eliminating the cost of installing sensors and networks by shifting it to every producer of everything in the world.
Who would then shift that cost (and all the unnecessary "features" they'd have to invent for their products) - to the customers.
While "the cloud" will pick up the rest.
Thus, "reducing the costs" of creating "ubiquitous computing" to software only - i.e. nothing, as developers are already being paid anyway, or they'll just do it for fun and experience.
That's the logic.
"The problem is that manual measurements are very common in hospitals, pharmaceutical delivery chains, and even the distribution of dairy and meat produce.
Someone actually goes to the warehouse to fill out a report with pen and paper every 3 hours," says Samsara's CEO Sanjit Biswas, whose previous network technology startup Meraki sold to Cisco for over $2 billion.
His big idea: installing cheap sensors, and uploading and analysing data to the cloud makes Samara 1/10th of the cost of existing industrial sensors (complex systems made by huge incumbents like Intel), and deployable in under 10 minutes.
"If you want a tailored system, someone like IBM will build you a custom solution but it usually costs $5m so it doesn't make sense unless you're a large company," he explains.
Andreessen is a fierce believer in the impact of this wave of software-driven sensor startups.
His core thesis is that over the next 20 years every physical item will have a chip implanted in it.
"The end state is fairly obvious - every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet.
Just like with the web itself, there will be thousands of of use cases - energy efficiency, food safety, major problems that aren't as obvious as smartwatches and wearables," he says.
Except that is not "software-driven sensors" but "sensor-driven software".
Which relies on someone first providing ubiquitous sensors in every doorknob - which could then be used for "major problems that aren't as obvious".
I.e. It's a solution we don't really have a problem for quite yet. But it would be great if someone else paid for it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My home was built circa 1890, I suspect it won't have any screens in the surfaces by 2090, it would spoil the asthetic.
With the demand for screens, I think what will come instead is that everyone will get screens, aka google glasses or implanted ala hud vision.
What I do see coming is stuff having tiny rfid-like ultra-micro sd cards in them with blue tooth capability powered by ambient temperature or something holding owners manual and stuff like that.
I think internet connected appliances will be a fad, how much money does anyone save turning lights on and off from work vs cost and security concerns? Who would trust an internet connected oven?
He also says widgets are great, and that despite living in only the 2nd or 3rd generation to be able to have widgets, they are not only essential but should be mixed into soda and consumed with every meal. The road to the future is paved with widgets, upon which we hold numerous patents. So. Buy widgets. Buy them by the truck load. Buy them TODAY!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here is what is more realistic... 90% of the devices we will interact with will recognize us. Tables, light switches, starbucks cafes and reusable mugs. All of these devices will have a certain level of personalization. The remaining 10% of the devices will be "dumb" devices that don't live on the internet, think of devices that "hacked" means a certain level of lethality, like microwave ovens and rangetops that have mandatory physical kill switches.
A lot of us in "first world problem" land gripe over security issues with internet connected devices, when that's not the problem. The safety problem needs to be resolved before they will be accepted by most people. But safety is often not even on the planning diagram. Think about how much safer driverless trains are, but light rail trains are some of the most dangerous things driven by humans. People will accept a driverless car when all cars are driverless-capable. People will accept the computer cooking you a meal when it knows about allergies and cross-contamination.
This is just stupid. So I don't need a dedicated "single piece of glowing display" in my hand anymore, because I happen to have a doorknob nearby with "some sort of chip implanted within" that is "connected to the internet". So to read a message, I will go touch the doorknob, and then a nearby light begins flashing the message out in morse code? I know that sounds dumb, but that is what he is inferring, right? You don't need a device in your hand because there's just a random assortment of connected stuff all around?
Dedicated devices purpose-built for interacting with humans will not go away until we have some kind of direct mental link to computers. The keyboard hasn't been replaced by touch screen devices. It serves a specific purpose that cannot be replaced by any other method of input, including speech recognition (I can just see myself coding with speech recognition - "Next line. Next line. Next line. Move right 5 words. Left one word. Right one character. Right one character. Delete. Ampersand." Uh huh.)
There is also the personal / privacy aspect. Just because I can project something on a wall 10' wide on the other side of the room doesn't mean I want to read and reply to my private messages in that way. What if there are 5 people in the same room? Who gets the wall? Or do we carve it up into 5 pieces? "Son, you take the left half of the coffee table, and mom, please take you feet off the coffee table so our daughter can use the other half. I get the west wall today, and hun, you can do your FB on the ceiling."
The number of holes in this silly prediction of the future are simply too great. It will not unfold in this manner.
Better known as 318230.
So does the television and computer, but you got those anyways.
Ambient is the name of a data service that broadcasts easily-agreed-upon facts like stock quotes and sports scores and stats and weather nowcasts and AccuWeather forecasts. Marc, you need to call this new concept something else.
Same ideas that Mark Weiser was talking about at Xerox PARC in the early 1980s.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
First it was people walking around being obsessed with USENET, discussion forums and flame wars. Then it was their iPhones - continuously textings, facebooking, whatever. I see them on the street all the time, not to mention in restaurants. But now that's not enough. Noooo... We're going to be connected through the Internet of Things - network connected refrigerators, stoves, home furnaces, lamps, medicine cabinets, toilets, table lamps and door knobs. And that's not to mention our self-driving cars and chips in our pets, kids and family members.
It's just the next step to Borg. Besides...
How is a guy EVER going to cheat on his wife?!
Marc Andreessen over-estimates his mental ability. He accidentally made a lot of money. Now he thinks he is intelligent.
A mere fragment of the summary tells the important point: ... is one of the biggest investors in technology.
Marc Andreessen
He was once a technologist but he has been a finance puke ever since. As with all of that kind, his primary interest now is in blowing the biggest bubbles he can bet on. Then he will quietly exit by selling to fools before the bubble bursts.
Why will your parent's retirement funds buy into these bubbles near their end of life? Because the same finance pukes tell them too!
Of the many items and functions I have put under computer control at my houses, exactly none of them were ever visible on any Internet link.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Someday, you won't be able to enter your house without waiting for a software update to complete. Nirvana!
Have you read my blog lately?
everyone will use things with internal computing power with some trivial connectivity to do things that they anyway did (perhaps more inefficiently) before.
that is not the same thing as people having control over these things to do what they want as they want it.
to have a connected intelligent preference sensitive gym equipment or washing machine is great, but without some "glowing display" or equivalent we can have very little easy active control over it . while "glowing display" may be "too limiting", removing full interactive control is much more limiting.
I'm still not seeing a strong use case for having every-thing connected ..
Certainly for things like furniture, just as not all those objects or walls will have need for a display.
It goes back to an old recycling meme .. the "you can extract petroleum, refine it, form it into pellets, form that into a fork, transport it to market where it is bought, transported to place of use and than finally -- used and discarded .. or you can wash the fork and set it aside for reuse".
Meaning in this context, you _could_ have the tables and chairs in a diner report their utilization and/or have a system optimally place customers to enable more people to be served in a given period .. or you can allow the much simpler approach customers use of "sit at an open table".
One little fly in the ointment.... security. Just what I need, some hacker in Nigeria turns off my table unless I give him access to my refrigerator to hide some $60M of his inheritance in gold bullion. Then what the hell am I supposed to do with a platform supported by a quattro-brace?
I'm struck that so many predictions of the future embody two simplistic and misguided assumptions. 1) That the future will progress in a straight line as an extension of the present and 2) that new technology is unquestionably an improvement.
One would think that with the current speed of development we would have developed some degree of immunity to the hypnotic allure of techno-pizzazz for its own sake.
we thank you for your cooperation.
Just imagine how difficult it will become to commit a crime. Pawn Shops would easily be made to not allow the purchase of any item whose chip is not reporting properly. Twisting a door knob could result in a pic being snapped of every home or door in your neighborhood. Every car, motorcycle or bicycle could record everywhere it goes as could every wallet or wrist watch. If we surveil every object, we actually end up surveilling every person 24/7/365. I wonder how much truth we can live with.
One of the first comments points out the massive security problems. I won't go into that (but it's probably the biggest issue).
Instead I'll say this- who will enforce standards?
Right now, we have a generally free market when it comes to standards, and it... kinda works. But only kinda.
Lets take this to the current day. Lets pretend you have an Android tablet, a Windows laptop, a Linux desktop, a new-ish television, and an ios phone.
To exchange displays today requires a huge array of programs. To put the phone on anything you'll need to either stream it (an app can do this) or use a cable (an entirely different app can do this). Then the thing you are getting data from needs to be set up to get the data, also unfortunate.
Just to put the desktop or laptop onto the TV requires some driver dance and some serious clickwork, and then you have to dick around on the TV to make it display that input. It's hard to do this, and displaying stuff on TV is literally the entire job of the TV. Unless the TV is the primary output of the desktop and then yadda yadda yadda.
So just to get to the point where I can put my phone (or id card, or watch, or anything that even just authenticates me) onto a device that makes a phone call or brings up an RPN calculator is a pain in the butt. We have the tech now, but nowhere close to the standards. Each TV has its own goddamned remote for some reason! The most enlightened ones are consistent within a brand, and that's still taking chances.
Ok, so maybe we don't need to get MY device onto the filthy public use device- maybe I just wave my hand and it reads a chip in my hand, which is some RFID sorta deal that authenticates me with that and a PIN. Ok, now it needs internet access to be useful at ALL- the fact that I want to view a picture needs to talk online- first to figure out who I am, then to get the picture. Right now, that's a button press. If I want to make a call, it first has to see who I am, then figure out what my contact is, then call the person- who I guess has something that lets him know he's getting called so he can go to his nearest GhettoPort and mirror the process.
Now, on to privacy- different a bit than security. If the GhettoPort that logs me on is compromised (and keep in mind, it can be PHYSICALLY compromised) then the fact that I need to authenticate through it is a real problem- someone mods it or grabs a modderbox from whoever, and now it's grabbing my personal info. Viewing that picture requires the picture to exist online, and the fact that I'm getting the picture is logged. So the fact that I'm awake, where I am, etc., can all be inferred. Phones have some of these downsides now, but this is even wilder.
So we don't have the standards to do this, we don't have the privacy infrastructure to do this ("encryption" is being attacked by almost all the candidates, despite it not being the sort of thing that the populace is against- meaning that by the time this happens, the political, privacy, and security situations will ALL be up for grabs), we don't have the NEED to do this, and I sorta think we don't have the economic situation to do this.
Call me when I can effortlessly push video and audio from one device to another without drama or a million clicks. Then maybe we can discuss all the other downsides to it- like the fact that when all your medical devices are networked, it's obvious to whomever is listening exactly what's going on (for better or for worse- probably for worse), and even worse, it's even more trivial than today to hack your smart IV and OD you for the lulz.
Years ago, with a then-ubiquitous Moto flip phone at my hip, I "invented" what I called the "Urban Commando Phone" - the cell phone already had a clock, why not add things like flashlight, garage door remote, TV Universal Remote, etc. so that instead of having dozens of devices, you had one to "rule them all".
I had no idea, at the time, of the types of convergence that would come in the form of the smart phone, which has all of these and many more either available built in
or easily available.
The term "ubiquitous computing" has been used for decades, and when I first heard the term, it was to convey the still-radical idea that every home would have a computer.
Computing seems to come in stages or "generations", where each previous generation generally powers or enables the next one. Mainframes became infrastructure for Mini computers, which (eventually) gave way to PCs, which then merged with Mini computers in the Internet revolution, which then gave birth to the smart phone era.
Following this trend, the "next big thing" will use Cell phones, PCs, and Servers to extend their capability. And this is already happening. My cell phone has a small cluster of devices that surround it that it interfaces with: Bluetooth headset, folding mobile keyboard, smart watch, etc. We are just beginning to innovate with these standards-based technologies to develop the true "IoT" that is coming; the things that link to our mobile phones to enable things we haven't begun to imagine.
Some examples that I've seen/heard of include all manner of medical devices: insulin pumps that use software on your smart phone to adjust or recommend insulin administration. Devices that provide the ability to test for common diseases "in the field" inexpensively, serving field medics and impoverished areas alike. Payment systems that use our mobile phones and networks to augment or replace credit cards.
And on and on. As always, the game is just beginning!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
> Marc Andreessen over-estimates his mental ability. He accidentally made a lot of money.
WTF? Inventing Napster was no accident! Jeez.
He didn't invent Napster, he founded Netscape. Remember them?
Computer science has already had a term for this, which has been talked about for decades "ubiquitous computing" - why is it that all of a sudden every moron is crawling out of the woodwork with some new fad term for this as if they have thought of something new?
you just have to love those one-time idea guys who've been fortunate enough to monetize big telling us their wisdom.
sounds like Marc-the-netscape-guy just had another grand vision.
wow. big time.
thank you.
My doorknobs, actually they are more like lever, are perfectly fine. They do not need to be computerized. I do not need a screen in my tables. At the work place there are too many things placed on them. And at home. The table is for eating. If there would be a screen in it, like in my tablet, then it would have to be cleaned intensively after every meal. And when I am eating, I am eating. I do not need to surf the net. And if I want to, I could still use my phone or tablet or notebook. I also do not need a computerized toilet. Maybe when I am old and in a home, there will be such thing.
And beside all that. It would require energy and resources like hell. We already have a resource problem. How about a working energy distribution system?
Although, they called it "ubiquitous computing". There were connected white-boards and sticky notes all over PARC when I visited there back in the 1980s. Anywhere a few people could have a hallway meeting, in the conference areas, and work spaces, scribbled ideas could be worked out saved and distributed, and recalled, as needed. Took a fair amount of back-end horsepower, but that was before a 64-bit computer fit on your wrist.
It had definite value to a creative group, as they had then, but in most workspaces or residences, it would just be distributing drivel and be a security nightmare.
Those things dan be hidden when jot in use
It doesn't matter what he thinks of his intelligence. I just wish the media would stop uncritically reporting the drivel he had to say. Better yet, they could ignore him entirely, which would be better.
Hey, if he hadn't run Netscape into the ground, I wouldn't be able to view this website on Firefox.
It's like seeing a sports star who was great back in the day, or an artist who did one good album.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As always the key problem is power delivery. Too many batteries, too many wires...lot of wasted energy in IoT. Its the same reason we have still have wooden doors and not automatic ones.
So, probably not the future everyone thinks it will be.
Ah, good old Nutscrape Nervergetthere.
Fucking piece of goddam shit. Mind, you, so was Inthenads Exploder at the time.
I remember when some sites would work on one and no the other, what a PITA.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Marc is spot on. IPV6 P2P device networks will move data and processing to the edge.
Device computing power (nanochips) only need a breakthrough in power or battery technology to drop costs to below commodity pricing. Expect nanoflash 8-32Gb storage and hybrid ARM/GOBI chipsets inside any device like a lightswitch. Give it less than 3 years.
You have that wrong... Microsoft, integrating a free browser into their OS, Internet Explorer, was the reason for the first antitrust suit against MS. That they gave discounts to companies to not install Netscape.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
If he thinks that objects everywhere will have displays his vision of the future is very limited. In the display will be always in front of our eyes similar to Google glasses, so we can have it literally ANYWHERE. This will shortly be supplanted by a neurological HUD without physical form.
And all of you running MA down have overseen the creation of much better, even world class, browser engines and finished browsers no doubt?
Really, whether you agree with MA or not, argue about the ideas, not the person. Didn't anybody, anywhere, anytime (mom, dad, teacher, mentor. professor?) ever teach you how to have a DISCUSSION? The focus of the discussion is on the ideas, not on the person. So let's reboot and try this again.
Shit! you just don't get it do you? Andressen, and what became of Netscape, are not the topic.
(actually, I liked Netscape more than anything else at the time. Then I liked Opera more. Then it fell behind and I went back to Netscape, except it was rebranded as Firefox, then I tried Chrome, then FF got better, then Chrome, then....
What was your problem to begin with? Oh, the way things change, ohhhh. And you are voting for Trump no doubt?
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Right.
Stupid little faggot.