What Technology Wants (43 page)

At the moment, computers seem to be headed in the opposite direction, toward becoming ever more general-purpose machines, as they swallow more and more functions. Entire occupations and their workers' tools have been subsumed by the contraptions of computation and networks. Computers have already absorbed calculators, spreadsheets, typewriters, film, telegrams, telephones, walkie-talkies, compasses and sextants, television, radio, turntables, draft tables, mixing boards, war games, music studios, type foundries, flight simulators, and many other vocational instruments. You can no longer tell what a person does by looking at their workplace, because they all look the same: a personal computer; 90 percent of employees are using the same tool. Is that the desk of the CEO, the accountant, the designer, or the receptionist? This convergence is amplified by cloud computing, where the actual work is done on the net as a whole and the tool at hand merely becomes a portal to the work. All portals have become the simplest possible window: a flat screen of some size.

This convergence is temporary. We are still in the early stages of computerization—or rather, intelligenation. Everywhere we currently apply our own personal intelligence (in other words, everywhere we work and play) we are rapidly applying artificial and collective intelligence as well, and rapidly overhauling our tools and expectations. We've intelligenized bookkeeping, photography, financial trading, metal machining, and airplane piloting, among thousands of other tasks. We are about to computerize automobile driving, medical diagnosis, and speech understanding. In our rush toward large-scale intelligenation, we first installed the general-purpose PC, with its mass-produced small brain, midsize screen, and conduit to the net. So all chores get the same tool. To complete the dispersion of intelligenation into all occupations will probably require another decade. Silly as it now sounds, we will put artificial intelligence into hammers, dental picks, forklifts, stethoscopes, and frying pans. All these tools will gain new powers by sharing the universal intelligence of the network. But as their newly augmented roles become clear, the tools will specialize. We can see the first glimmers in the iPhone, Kindle, Wii, tablets, and netbooks. As display and battery technology catches up to chips, the interface to ubiquitous intelligenation will diverge and specialize. Soldiers and other athletes who use their full body want large-scale, enveloping screens, while mobile road warriors will want small ones. Gamers want minimal latency; readers want maximum legibility; hikers want waterproofing; kids want indestructibility. The portals into the grid of computation, or the net, will specialize to a remarkable degree. The keyboard, for one, will lose its monopoly. Speech and gesture input will gain a major role. Spectacle and eyeball screens will supplement walls and flexible surfaces.

With the advent of rapid fabrication (machines that can fabricate things on demand in quantities of one) specialization will leap ahead so that any tool can be customized to an individual's personal needs or desires. Very niche-y functions may summon devices that are assembled for only one task and then unassembled. Ultraspecialized artifacts may live for only a day, like a mayfly. The “long tail” of niches and personal customization is a characteristic not merely of media but of technological evolution itself.

We can forecast the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity.

The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ever-presence. Given a chance, dandelions or raccoons or fire ants will replicate till they cover the Earth. Evolution equips a replicant with tricks to maximize its spread no matter the constraints. But because physical resources are limited and competition relentless, no species can ever reach full ubiquity. Yet all life is yearning in that direction. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Because humans are limited (only six billion alive at the moment) and there are tens of millions of species of technology or memes to spread, few gadgets can reach full 100 percent ubiquity, although several come close.

Nor do we really want all technology to be ubiquitous. Preferably, we would engineer away the need for replacement artificial hearts through genetics or pharmaceuticals or diet. In the same way, the remedial technology of carbon sequestration (removing carbon from the atmosphere) would ideally never become ubiquitous. Much better would be the ubiquity of low-carbon energy sources in the first place, using the technologies of photons (solar), fusion (nuclear), wind, or hydrogen. The problem with remedial technologies is that once their niches are filled, they lead nowhere else. A vaccine has no future if it is universally successful. In the long run, convivial technologies that open up other technologies tend to ascend to ubiquity fastest.

From the perspective of the planetary biosphere, the most ubiquitous technology on Earth is agriculture. The steady surplus of high-quality food from agriculture is vigorously open-ended in that this abundance enabled civilization and birthed its millions of technologies. The spread of agriculture is the largest-scale engineering project on the planet. One third of Earth's land surface has been altered by the mind and hand of humans. Native plants have been displaced, soil moved, and domesticated crops planted in their stead. Great stretches of Earth's surface have been semidomesticated into pastureland. The most drastic of these changes—such as uninterrupted tracts of giant farms—are visible from space. Measured in number of square kilometers, the most ubiquitous technology on the planet are the five major domesticated crops: maize, wheat, rice, cane sugar, and cows.

The second most plentiful planetary technology is roads and buildings. Simple clearings for the most part, dirt roads extend their rootlike tentacles into most watersheds, crisscrossing valleys and winding their way up many mountains. The web of constructed roads forms a reticulated cloak around the continents of this planet. A string of buildings follow along the dendritic branches of roads. These artifacts are made of cut tree fiber (wood, thatch, bamboo) or molded Earth (adobe, brick, stone, concrete). At the hubs of roads stand magnificent stone and silica megalopolises, which have rerouted the flow of materials so that much of the technium circulates through them. Rivers of food and raw materials flow in, and debris flows out. Every person living in a developed urban area moves 20 tons of material annually.

Not as visible, but perhaps more pervasive at the planetary level, are the technologies of fire. Controlled burning of carbon fuels, particularly mined coal and oil, has led to changes in the Earth's atmosphere. Reckoned in total mass and converge, these furnaces (which often travel along the roads as engines in automobiles) are dwarfed by roads. Though smaller in scale than the roads they ride on or the homes and factories they burn in, these tiny, deliberate fires are able to shift the composition of the globe's voluminous atmosphere. It is possible that this collective burning, tiny in footprint, may be the largest-scale technological impact on the planet.

Then there are the things we surround ourselves with. In daily human life, the list of near-ubiquitous technologies includes cotton cloth, iron blades, plastic bottles, paper, and radio signals. These five technological species are within reach of nearly every human alive today, both in the cities and in the most remote rural villages. Each of these technologies opens up vast new territories of possibilities: paper—cheap writing, printing, and money; metal blades—art, craft, gardening, and butchering; plastic—cooking, water, and medicines; radio—connection, news, and community. Fast on their heels follow the nearly ubiquitous species of metal pots, matches, and cell phones.

Accelerating Pace of Technology Adoption.
The percentage of U.S. consumers owning or using a particular technology plotted over the number of years since its invention.

Total ubiquity is the end point that all technologies tend toward but never reach. But there is a practical ubiquity of near saturation that is sufficient to flip the dynamic of a technology onto another level. In urban places everywhere, the speed at which new technologies disperse to the point of saturation has been increasing.

Whereas it took electrification 75 years to reach 90 percent of U.S. residents, it's taken only 20 years for cell phones to reach the same penetration. The rate of diffusion is accelerating.

And more is different. Something strange happens with ubiquity. A few automobiles roaming along a few roads is fundamentally different from a few automobiles for every person. And not just because of the increased noise and pollution. A billion operating cars spawn an emergent system that creates its own dynamics. Ditto for most inventions. The first few cameras were a novelty. Their impact was primarily to fire painters from the job of recording the times. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternative realities. The diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism, and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the conviction that something is not real until it is captured on camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The still further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room's ceiling, forces a transparency upon society. Eventually, every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous, everything is recorded for all time. We have a communal awareness and memory. These effects powered by ubiquity are a long way from simply displacing painting.

Again and again ubiquity changes everything.

One thousand automobiles open up mobility, create privacy, supply adventure. One
billion
automobiles create suburbia, eliminate adventure, erase parochial minds, trigger parking problems, birth traffic jams, and remove the human scale of architecture.

One thousand live, always-on cameras make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stoplight runners, and record police misbehavior. One
billion
live, always-on cameras serve as a community monitor and memory, they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs, they restructure the notion of the self, and they reduce the authority of authorities.

One thousand teleportation stations rejuvenate vacation travel. One
billion
teleportation stations overturn commutes, reimagine globalism, introduce tele-lag sickness, reintroduce the grand spectacle, kill the nation-state, and end privacy.

One thousand human genetic sequences jump-start personalized medicine. One
billion
genetic sequences every hour enable real-time genetic damage monitoring, upend the chemical industry, redefine illness, make genealogies hip, and launch “ultraclean” lifestyles that make organic look filthy.

One thousand screens the size of buildings keep Hollywood going. One
billion
screens everywhere become the new art, create a new advertising medium, revitalize cities at night, accelerate locative computing, and rejuvenate the commons.

One thousand humanoid robots revamp the Olympics and give a boost to entertainment companies. One
billion
humanoid robots cause massive shifts in employment, reintroduce slavery and its opponents, and demolish the status of established religions.

In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question, What happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?

Usually what happens to a ubiquitous technology is that it disappears. Shortly after their invention in 1873, modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large, expensive motor in the place where a steam engine had formerly stood. That single engine turned a complex maze of axles and belts, which in turn spun hundreds of smaller machines scattered throughout the factory. The rotational energy twirled through the buildings from that single source.