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Is The World Shifting To 'Ambient Computing'? (computerworld.com)
In the future, "A massive convergence of technologies will enable us to use computers and the internet without really using them," argues Computerworld.
At the dawn of the personal computing revolution, people "operated" a computer. They sat down and did computing -- often programming. Later, with the application explosion, operators became "users." People used computers for purposes other than programming or operating a computer -- like balancing their checkbooks or playing video games. All computing uses so far have required a cognitive shift from doing something in the real world to operating or using a computer. Ambient computing changes all that, because it involves using a computer without consciously or deliberately or explicitly "using" a computer....
It's just there, guiding and nudging you along as you accomplish things in life. Ambient computing devices will operate invisibly in the background. They'll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits. So a good working definition of ambient computing is "computing that happens in the background without the active participation of the user...."
In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient -- all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life. Between now and then we'll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.
Though the article identifies smart speakers are the first ambient computing devices most people will encounter, it's argues that that's just the beginning of a much larger change.
"We're also going to be flooded and overwhelmed by the 'ambient computing' hype as, I predict, it will become one of the most overused and abused marketing buzzwords ever."
It's just there, guiding and nudging you along as you accomplish things in life. Ambient computing devices will operate invisibly in the background. They'll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits. So a good working definition of ambient computing is "computing that happens in the background without the active participation of the user...."
In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient -- all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life. Between now and then we'll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.
Though the article identifies smart speakers are the first ambient computing devices most people will encounter, it's argues that that's just the beginning of a much larger change.
"We're also going to be flooded and overwhelmed by the 'ambient computing' hype as, I predict, it will become one of the most overused and abused marketing buzzwords ever."
for new sales slogans.
Yeah, just like tablets have replaced the PC. Call me skeptical
Writing a paper or a book, graphing/crunching data, editing images, etc, on an Amazon Echo or other smart speaker. Often, you really do need a screen and maybe even a keyboard.
This sounds like a nightmare.
Yes there will be more 'ambient technology' just as the remote control for the TV saved us from having to get up and change the channel.
Computing devices, from the abacus to the super computer will still be tools designed to create content. Not simply to consume it.
The future sounds fucking awful.
The opening premise misunderstands what computers have been used for. Computers have always been used for purposes other than "using a computer". Computers since day one were a means to an end. Whether it be cracking german encryption, computing artillery tables, or a variety of other purposes. "Balancing the checkbook" is what computers have always been built for.
After all, think of what IBM stands for: International Business Machines. They weren't building computers so people could program, it was so people could solve business problems. Programming was just a means to an end.
Sure, some javascript kiddies program purely for fun and to pad their github, not really solving anything, but that is an anomalous situation in the history of computing, by far not the majority.
The rest of us will still attempt to use them with the same control (note, I didn't say interfaces) we have today, although I expect they will be quite locked down in comparison to today's hardware, unless there is a huge push to regain control of technology, either by 'hobbyist' level chip fabrication (go look at how much the 8 bit era fabs cost in comparison to modern ones), or by pushes from individuals within companies to make them more open. The latter is probably pie in the sky, but given the talk of Intel open sourcing their FSP (they didn't say anything about the signing keys, which would make access to the FSP code pointless, outside of bug bounties/analysis.)
We certainly live in interesting times indeed.
Computers already exist in most everything, people just don't think of MCUs as computers but they have everything needed for computing. Cars, monitors, anything that's bluetooth, old 90s cell phones, your fitbit, anything that is USB, traffic signal controllers, digital cameras and just about everything that needs electricity have computers in them. Your credit cards are even computers. You can say that's a low bar but they all computer fast enough to leave the old mainframes in the dust.
Just because your computer has "one job" doesn't make it less of a computer, it just means you are unaware that you are surrounded by computers and what you think of as a computer is a macrocomputer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Ambient computing" was first envisioned by George Orwell back in 1949.
"In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient — all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life."
Good luck with that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
https://www.sparkrail.org/Pages/HSTriz.aspx
in case our psychotronic crown royal overlords go off the deep end again? forced into independent thinking we chant; cease fire stand down, there are mothers & children in every town. conspire to occupy the truth.. thanks again
I would say that 'the first' would be whatever was your first toy with an embedded controller in it.
Journalist airhead alert, though. Did the writer only recently discover there are computers everywhere?
âIn the 21st century the technology revolution will move into the everyday, the small and the invisible.
Mark Weiser coined the phrase "ubiquitous computing" around 1988, during his tenure as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Both alone and with PARC Director and Chief Scientist John Seely Brown.
Weiser wrote "The Computer for the 21st Century" back in 1991.â
https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Weiser-SciAm.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20180124233736/http://www.ubiq.com:80/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html
https://youtu.be/o4_CcNLd2iE
http://lowendmac.com/ed/rosen/10ar/ubiquitous-computing.html
The interface between mind and machine is the prohibitive thing right now. Keyboard and mouse are primitive. Voice, slightly less primitive. The essential thing that will make computers serve us, as imagined in TFS, is a vastly improved interface.
That will be a neural interface connecting our nerve synapses directly to an implanted intermediary. I'm imagining a parallel interface, perhaps with 81 neurons connected with 81 electrodes, creating a 64 digit path with some redundancy for individual connections that may go bad. That intermediary, in turn, will link to 'ambient' computers nearby (most likely via Bluetooth or similar) to allow us to interact with powerful machines at extremely high rates of speed. Human language will be hopelessly incapable of managing this communication. A method of my creation will easily and quickly train our minds to handle a more direct and unambiguous communication appropriate to digital devices. (Very well suited for programmers too.)
At the moment, we eagerly await the materials that will allow a long term connection between a neuron and a digital device. There has been some progress but no success yet.
...omphaloskepsis often...
...hacked IOT toilet paper
Table-ized A.I.
n/t
In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient -- all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life. Between now and then we'll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.
I, for one, welcome our Ambient Overlords.
Sure, some javascript kiddies program purely for fun and to pad their github, not really solving anything, but that is an anomalous situation in the history of computing, by far not the majority.
Are you sure about that being an anomaly? For all I know, Windows 10 or Mozilla Firefox could have been coded by 'JavaScript kiddies' and few people would even notice...
Psychedelic Computing ?
Techno Computing ?
Reggae Computing
Rock & Roll Computing
Drum & Bass Computing
Rhytm & Blues Computing
Red&Blue Computing
Gothic Computing
Steampunk Computing
Stove Computing (always nice to sit next to a nice and warm stove in the winter, though less nice if you leave your computing device on the stove.
Natural Computing (using only organicaly grown vegetables)
Etheric Computing
Relativistic Computing
D&D Computing
Fantasy Computing
sous-vide Computing
the list goes on and on and on....
List Computing :-D
caption : cohere
Computers don't change into a just existing unconsciously used thing. We people are lazy. We're replacing the tedious real world with an artificial more convenient one. Computers are not going to help us improve reality (e.g. help us find real friends), but they are going to provide an artificial environment that is a lot more convenient (e.g. friends can be created with a few clicks or swipes).
Computers provide a more abstract environment, where things move faster than in reality. That's the case for games, and that's also the case for everything where computers are substituting reality.
Nudging? Prodding!
Ubiquitous computers are the "big tech" (actually "big ad") corp's cattle prods.
We are the cattle.
Mooo.
Ambient Surveillance.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Eightball and Betteridge agree: Signs point to no.
The computer told me to vote Democrat. I did. But after I casted my vote, I still didn't get a good answer as to what a Democrat is.
There was an option called "Republican", but the computer didn't seem to understand what that was.
Probably the author has registered "ambientcomputing.com" or something.
I already don't sit down "to use a computer". I sit down to watch a movie, play a game, write an article, read the news or create software. The machine itself has faded into the background now that we've finally managed to the the darn things functioning most of the time so you don't spend half your waking hours just babysitting the operating system (can you tell I'm not a windows user?).
This trend has been going on for a long time and is continuing smoothly. Yes, the machine fades more and more into the background. Both my car and my HomePod have voice interfaces and hide the fact that they're essentially computers attached to a gadget. Robots have made a lot of progress now that machine learning is real (well, computing speed became fast enough. There's little in machine learning that wasn't invented 20 years ago, but we can finally run it on consumer hardware in real-time).
Sure, in 20 more years we will have computers in everything, reacting to sensor data, voice input and such. But that's just smart electronics. It'll blur the line to computers mostly because it's cheaper these days to put a general-purpose CPU and a full-blown OS in and write custom software than it was to build some custom electronics. From a security perspective, IoT is both a nightmare and an opportunity (where the window of opportunity is closing fast and almost nobody used it to do things the right way, but I'm not complaining it means job security for the next decades while we old guys can sell ourselves for great daily rates to all those startups who re-invented the wheel, made it square because time-to-market and now applaud our genius for telling them that it rolls better when it's round).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why are these articles, in hindsight, always so shitty?
This reeks of "we'll have flying cars in 20 years!!" nonsense from back then.
We do, but it's extremely niche.
Ambient computing is for consumers, not makers, well, not all makers.
Anything that goes beyond simple talking requires, you guessed it, actual hands-on work.
It's akin to writing a book versus building a fucking car from scratch. Totally different tasks.
20 years? We'll be lucky if we even have decent self-driving cars in that time! All these stupid companies claiming it will totally happen next year! After a person was terminated by one, not to mention they can be messed with by pieces of tape over signs, yeah, 2019 for sure!
ML is brute-force crap that not a single person understands. Nobody. It's literally digital neurology levels of complicated. We've made digital brains that make their own digital brains and we have no clue how they operate. We're back to stage 1. Wooo, go autoencoding! The f u t u r e is here.
Can't wait for that shitfest. Stay off the roads, kids, otherwise the Goog will getcha!
Hows this even new thing?
I remember decades ago this was called ubiq computing. And its already here. mobile phones, digital banking with all its troubles, etc...
"Keyboard and mouse are primitive. Voice, slightly less primitive"
Actually the keyboard and mouse are extremely good for the tasks they were designed for. Try saying "int main left round bracket int A-R-G-C comma char star star A-R-G-V right round bracket left curly bracket..."
etc faster than I can type the equivalent.
Similarly good luck using photoscope going "ok, do a transform from that point there, no left a bit, no right a bit, no there, THERE! , yes thats it, now drag that down from 10 pixels back ... no TEN, oh FFS, wheres my mouse..."
Unless your computing device *is* the stove, of coursrn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Article poorly defines nevertheless real class of computers that did come to prominence.
Follow the examples, not how author poorly defines the area of these examples in words.
The key word is interaction, not the fact that computers operate in the background without people knowing it.
Fitbit in your list is the only relevant example.
What author talks about is about UI. Where UI is something that you control less and less with your conscience, and more and more by something that you can't control with your brain.
fitbit monitors your pulse and pressure and computes based on that UI. Alexa monitors your spontaneous desires to buy things during advertising seasons. Almost. You still have to add "Alexa" because lawsuits.
One of non-Tesla American car manufacturers monitors your pupil activity to detect if you are fully aware of driving while using modern car assist technologies that do not require your driving input for quite long periods of time now.
Tesla uses the touch of your hand for the same purpose, but it's the same thing.
Soon the computers will detect you shivering and warm you up with a whiff of a warm air from nearby air duct nozzle. Or detect your body head via infrared monitors and cool you off with a whiff of a gentle San Diego night breeze.
There are plenty of independent driving factors that will help these sort of technologies take larger and larger share of the market:
- aging population that (a) can't catch up with modern computing (b) loses sanity
- necessity to know and exploit what consumer _really_ feels about things to personalize the marketing
These two giant factors are pretty solid.
Besides, we have already invented all these devices zillion times over in our Sci-Fi literature. This sort of computing have been a collective dream of humanity for a long time now.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The world is not shifting to ambient computing but rather ambient computing is spreading into the world.
Ambient computing is very prominent already and from where I sit right now in my living room, I can see two actual computers (the laptop I'm working on and a Raspberry Pi that is my home server) but the number of embedded CPUs is much higher: TV, sound bar, smart light, settop box, BluRay player, calculator, smartphone, landline phone, VoIP box, printer, camera, MiFi box, ...) that's at least twelve CPUs, so ambient computing is here and has been here for a long time already.
Voice control is never going to be relevant for a lot of computer work -- especially if you are working next to other people. I was recently working next to a small room with 20+ programmers, coding like mad. Imagine they were doing that coding by talking to their computers and the twin brothers had to be separated as the computers could not distinguish them from each other. Or how the noise level would slowly rise as each programmer is trying to get through to their computer instead of it picking up the neighbour's voice. Or how difficult it would be to concentrate in such an environment. No, that ain't gonna happen. (Probably going to be a famous embarrassment like 640kB is enough memory for any job -- Hi Bill!)
Voice control is fine for some things when working alone (retouching photos, for example, with commands like "Brush size 200" or "Hide smoothing layer", only much retouching will be automated too so less human retouching will be needed) and many things that are intermittent like "Turn on the lights in the living room" or "What is the temperature in Anchorage right now".
I was watching someone on his phone going through Instagram postings, which was an exercise in flick; flick; press; tap, tap, tap; press; flick; flick; ... It is hard to imagine that could be better (or quicker) done with voice commands but easy to imagine how irritating the voice commands would be to others.
Being a sour, misanthropic curmudgeon, who values his privacy, my biggest concern is the amount of information ambient "computers" will "leak" (by design or by accident) to third parties.I have no big secrets and definitely nothing that would cause me major embarrassment (maybe a few raised eyebrows), but I still close the bathroom door when I'm out and about, just like I try to stop the information leaks online to the extent I can.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
...we do really need
Greed is the root of all evil.
You know, one that has no spectre issues and runs above 3GHz.
So, get your head out of your ass, please.
Thanks a lot
Too late.
is called spying so ads can gather more data.
Don't let any new "computer" do this.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Re: "to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us." -- For us? Are you kidding? More likely, "for those who control our computers." The real money will be in corporations that can use our computers to coerce us into buying stuff we don't want and voting for candidates and policies that are against our best, longer-term interests. So basically, more of the same but with even fewer humans involved in the process.
The computer told me to vote Democrat. I did. But after I casted my vote, I still didn't get a good answer as to what a Democrat is.
Democrats are the people who used to build things. Republicans are the people who used to care what things cost.
This is purely semantic. The tech boom of the 90s was a red herring - if we'd had modern mobile technology then, no one would have bought PCs but those that need them for actual computing, just as now. What this is talking about is appliance, and fundamentally that would be like calling phone lines or electricity 'ambient computing'. This is a very poorly written piece and post, and some very either lazy, or just sad thinking.
The network is the computer. Java Ubiquitous computing. Smart toasters.
https://www.javaworld.com/arti...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Until we figure out how to write secure apps and apps that don't crash or need continual updates, ambient computing is a dystopia.
The easiest way to debunk this kind of naive futurism is to postulate what else much also change.
Right now we're in a time of tremendous asymmetry, where the vast majority of computer serves against the explicit interests of the end user. You know, you've got a life plan to make something of yourself, and the Internet says "hey, dude, why don't you click on these artfully extended boobies instead (we know you want to)". But you don't want to, just a tiny little bit of your lizard brain craves a short-term dopamine hit. The less you feed your lizard, the easier it becomes to tune out distraction and make something out of your life.
Until this dynamic is fixed, ambient computing is for schmucks only. Guaranteed, the further you fall into the ambience, the more your lizard brain is carved up by the ad auction of least customer thriving give-a-shit.
Wake me up when ambient computing serves to manage unwanted provocations of our lizard brains, like a good Jiminy Jarvis.
Because the smart money won't be voluntarily boarding good ship Ubiquitous Titillation on present terms.
Most of my typos are full-word substitutions: "what else must also change" turned into "what else much also change" when my "time to eat your yummy freshly baked bread" oven-timer went off mid-sentence, causing the ch from 'change' to subconsciously channel David Bowie, by the all-too-alluring lizard logic.
They'll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits...
(actually isn't that the stale hell we used to call the world-wide-web back in olden times?)
Ambulant not ambient.
Computing has gone mobile, it has become physically portable.
It has grown wheels and legs, and wings, and hands.
It has become wireless.
The inevitability that matter will have the power of a mind is
manifesting before out very eyes. Right now we consider
computers as "smart tools" for our use, but soon that moniker
will be put back on us by the machines. We will be the "smart tools"
with limited uses for furthering their objectives.
We throw around the term "AI" like a comic book superhero,
not having much idea about it. But we need to change AI to
Evolving, Adaptive, Responsive, Purposeful, Mobile, Manipulative, or something
to more accurately describe the Ambulant and Self-Governing nature
of the Semi-Autonomous hypersmart machines in our near future.
Spybots are already here, roaming around electronically scooping
up data from fixed locations, and a small percentage can fly or creep around
on wheels. Experimental mini spybots are insect-like with legs or snake-like
with articulating skeletons and the mechanical equivalent of muscles.
Expectations towards machines are still in the stage where
people do not expect a machine to order them around.
We are still at the stage where there is almost always
a way to get around a machines decisions by talking to
a real person with "higher authority" than the computer.
But unless we make it a law, and soon, that that will always
be the case, it won't always be the case.
When there is no way to get around a machine's decision
we can't live with, there will be a wake-up call.
When a doctor-bot refuses to treat an influential human
for some machine-derived reason, there will be hell to pay
and a re-think of the machine-man relationship. Hopefully
it will not be too late by then.
So don't buy IoT or persistent-listening devices.
Marketers are trying hard to push these things on consumers, but if no one buys them, then it won't happen.
I actually want this but I object to the name. I want Ambien Computing!
Zzzz...
But you don't want to, just a tiny little bit of your lizard brain craves a short-term dopamine hit.
That's a great way to put it. Nice.
I think the same thing, and I'm afraid it's going to doom our society in the end. That next kitty meme is more and more winning out against... let's say... learning math and science. Or woodworking.
...not for anything important to the user;
Important to busybodies, spies, marketers, and authoritarians?
That might be a different question, with a different answer....
Irony: $CAPTCHA=="marvels"
The key word is interaction, not the fact that computers operate in the background without people knowing it.
Yeah, most of the things on my list are like that because they didn't used to have (general purpose) CPUs in them.
What author talks about is about UI. Where UI is something that you control less and less with your conscience, and more and more by something that you can't control with your brain.
Sounds like a more apt name would be Invasive Computing. Seems like marketing isn't too keen on the truth though.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
why not, but NOT if it includes all the build-in spyware these things come with today.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.