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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.
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.
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."
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.
Most of US will still have at least one "real" computer, if only because it'll be the one device we have that's not nearly as locked-down as everything else, and can be used for things that weren't necessarily anticipated at the time it was designed.
The fact is, any sealed appliance that was prematurely value-engineered for an emerging technology is doomed to end up as a paperweight and/or in a landfill within a year or two, because almost BY DEFINITION any device that's non-extensible and limited to what its creators envisioned (or was part of this year's Official Business Strategy) is bound to be made obsolete by the next generation of technology.
Imagine, for a moment, if the wet dreams of the embedded (non-Android/IOS) tablet advocates had come true, and cheap non-extensible tablet-like devices had become pervasive circa 2005 for viewing web content over wi-fi. We'd probably STILL be waiting for CSS2 (let alone 3) to become usable without major backwards-compatibility hacks & kludges. H.264 would still be "the future", and .flv would probably have been enshrined and immutable forever because nothing else would reliably work on those devices. Hell, even with relatively OPEN standards, we're still mostly stuck on 2.4GHz 802.11n for lower-cost products. I think 2-3 years ago was the first time I could run 2.4GHz 802.11n in "greenfield" mode without having to back it up with a second set of access points locked to 802.11b for the sake of a few lingering old devices that couldn't see an 802.11n access point that was operating in greenfield mode. When I redid my parents' WiFi last Christmas, I STILL had to leave their old AP set up on another channel for the sake of 3 cameras they had that could only do b/g, and couldn't do n-greenfield.
Let's not forget the arrival of HD video. Circa 2007, there were basically three ways to get HD video into a TV: a cable or satellite box (if you were really lucky), an OTA tuner, or a computer with a DVI cable. Blu-Ray was still "coming soon", D-VHS was a cruel joke that, like DAT, was ruined by dysfunctional DRM before it even GOT to the point of anybody caring how expensive it was. And the way the CE industry casually condemned two or three entire generations of HDMI-only media players into audio obsolescence by first demanding only HDMI (no Toslink or S/PDIF), then failing to have any kind of meaningful certification FOR guaranteed HDMI audio compatibility, so even people who BOUGHT new receivers circa 2012-2014 ended up getting fucked because the receiver, media player, and TV couldn't agree about the proper way to signal compatibility and gracefully fall back. And no sooner did the CE industry FINALLY start to get HDMI 1.4c working properly with surround sound and receivers, it turned around and deprecated HDCP 2.0 before the first generation of HDMI 2.0-compatible receivers even made it into retail stores, then subjected us to another 2-3 generations of at least partially-dysfunctional hardware that was literally "defective by design".
So... I still watch streaming video with an old laptop on a dock with a Toslink port and Windows 7 (running Windows Media Center as a DVR), because it's increasingly become the last refuge of Toslink surround-sound compatibility, and because I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to buy another round of new equipment only to have it all rendered obsolete within a year. When I can buy new gear that has ironclad-guaranteed gotcha-free compatibility with ATSC 3.0, 4k video, and whatever new standards they both decide to demand... I might contemplate dropping a few thousand dollars buying new equipment. Until then, they'll have to pry my HTPC from my cold, dead hands.
It's bullshit. It's a throwback to the days when computers where run by men in white coats and you had no business even getting close to a computer. It's all about disempowering the user, and centralize power to the high and mighty.
It means you will use your computer for what the powers that be have foreseen and authorized as legitimate uses, and nothing else, which is ass-backwards to what the PC was all about, empowering users and use it to augment their own, personal skills by offloading the tedium to the machine and concentrate on the important stuff, without having to ask permission from the high priests first.
This isn't about convenience, it's about power, surreptitious surveillance and control.
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...
Ambient Surveillance.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
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
"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..."
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.
is called spying so ads can gather more data.
Don't let any new "computer" do this.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.
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.
This is slashdot. We'll still have "real" computers, because somebody has to write the code.
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.
Interesting that you and the morons who modded you up are all conspiracy theorists.
Just another day in Paradise
I'm not so sure that the real geeks will still be here. The site has turned away from it's roots, and become much more about Trump, Climate Change, etc. It's certainly not why I signed up.
Just another day in Paradise
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.
Interesting that you and the morons who modded you up are all conspiracy theorists.
I don't know much about conspiracy theories, but the notion of "authorized approved-by-manufacturer purposes only" attitude is quite prevalent in tech, and the PC is more of an aberration in that respect than the norm. Phones, music players, game consoles, games in general all try to put as many roadblocks in the way to general purpose computing as they can. Media companies have tried to push the closed paradigm onto the PC world, whether it's DRM-protected content, Sony's stupid rootkits, streaming content only playable with specific players, and HDPC. Over time, they take two steps forward toward that goal, then one step back.