Tomorrow's People

by Susan Greenfield

  Already, a Melbourne-based design company called Crowd has introduced the concept of the Hyperhouse, in which a central electronic spine enables appliances to be moved around and plugged in at different locations, whilst the floor plan and walls are completely flexible. So, kitchens and bathrooms need not be the fixed points in a turning world that they are today; rather, all space can be used differently at different times. This idea of endless change, and of endless possibility, is echoed by designer Fred Blumlein: ‘The house of the future will be sort of like having a servant. With an automatic, whiz-bang, digitally controlled environment, you'll make a wish and your wish comes true.’

  We are not talking here of clunky gadgets that in a gimmicky old sci-fi way emulate basic human actions, like opening doors. Rather, the encroachment of IT and the pull of the virtual world will mean that, for better or worse, you are hardly ever truly alone. And as the boundaries smudge between yourself and the outside world, between you and your wishes, you yourself might become a vaguer phenomenon.

  Moreover, if home-offices are to blend into individual private areas with work-stations, all effectively under one roof, then we can expect a reversal of the ratio of computer-dominated rooms to old-style, non-virtual living rooms. The virtual, computer-run areas of the house would increase until the presence of technology might seem inescapable. It would be a world in which we might still feel the need to preserve certain aspects of our privacy and of our social selves. Future homes might feature a single room left as ‘natural’ or ‘real’, the ceiling stripped bare of videoconferencing devices, medical and security scanners, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning sensors and environmental regulators. Just as the opulent home of today might boast a sauna-room that is used for a relaxing communal activity outside the usual routine of daily life, so a ‘real room’ might have similar appeal – without the luxury or elitist status. After all, it would be hard to have a spending spree when the room was devoted to an absence of gadgets and facilities.

  In most of the house, however, the IT-dominated environment will permit emptier and more multifunctional spaces: fewer, larger rooms might become the norm, compared with the present-day tendency for many small areas with fixed furniture for fixed functions. Moreover, there is no reason why the boundary between indoor and outdoor living space should not succumb to the same trends, and the distinction between home and garden, already fading, become completely non-existent by 2020. The notion of ‘outside’ versus ‘inside’ might cease to have any relevance regarding meteorological caprices: almost sixty years ago the architect Buckminster Fuller drew a fantasy, a dome over New York. It is hardly stretching the imagination too much, therefore, to conceive of large-scale residential areas where the outside is as regulated as the inside.

  These large-scale changes might sound very futuristic but temperature-sensitive paint, developed by a company in Shanghai, is already with us: this innovative substance cools your home in summer and warms it in winter. At the same time crystal violet lactone, a thermochromic substance, produces, as its name suggests, a variety of hues at differing temperatures. In winter the house would be a warming red, and in summer a cooling blue. Flexibility in environments, and the speed with which they can adapt to changing needs or circumstances, will be the buzzword, and the yardstick.

  In order for us to live in such an endlessly changing environment the next generation of smart heuristic devices will not slavishly carry out preprogrammed operations but will function on an ‘if X, then Y’ basis. Domestic appliances that are not just automated but also proactive will be the staple of everyday life, and this may even extend to gadgets for leisure: toys, ping-pong sets and even musical instruments. For example, instead of scraping away on a violin, you might prefer to use a recreational simulator whose crafty software could work on your ham-fisted efforts to simulate a Stradivarius sound effect.

  So you could be living in an environment where all the domestic, work and leisure devices that nowadays you switch on manually instead burst into operation at your spoken commands. In time this spoken command will no longer seem silly or embarrassing or even downright impractical as computer-controlled smart objects, ‘things that think’, become part of everyday life. True, it has so far been quicker to open doors with our hands, press buttons with our fingers and turn real keys in real locks. Any intervening electronics have seemed clunky, time-wasting and therefore silly gimmicks rather than true assets. But in the future the difference will lie in the personalization of those objects, and hence in how you interact with them. Future generations will customize the volleys of mechanized voices that will tear through their every waking moment. Such voices, and such machines, may well end up as friends, or rather servants. Presumably it will be child's play, literally, to choose the gender and accent of domestic appliances, even perhaps customizing the voice patterns to sound like those of friends or celebrities. Your alarm call could be Marilyn Monroe or Leonardo di Caprio cajoling you by name to wake up, or more bizarrely, your own voice… This is not a catalogue of ‘wow’ phenomena and inventions, but rather the beginning of understanding how we might think about ourselves in a rather different way, and how the boundary between ourselves and the outside world might start to blur.

  But remote yet personalized interactions with smart domestic appliances will be relatively trivial in everyday life. Bigger transformations will already be afoot that will influence thought processes – for example in obviating the need to learn another language by using a multi-language translator phone. Similarly, but counter-intuitively, the computer might take the familiar form of a book, at least an IT version. Neil Gershenfeld, in his timely When Things Start to Think, catalogues the virtues of books over computers. Books boot instantly, and have a high-contrast/high-resolution display; they are viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light; they offer fast random access to any page, with instant visual and tactile feedback; they are easily annotated with no need for batteries or maintenance; finally, they are robustly packaged. By contrast, the laptop meets none of these specifications.

  How could the user-friendly aspects of a book be combined with the efficiency of IT? Reusable printer paper is already possible; it uses e-ink contained in the paper by a micro-encapsulation technique. The next step would be to print wires and transistors on paper to form circuits, so that a radio receiver could be integrated with the paper. This device could be run on solar energy, so that if the ‘paper’ were left out in daylight to power its circuits, a radio signal could deliver a news update each day: the morning paper of the future. As Gershenfeld has pointed out, the only disadvantage of books is that they convey static information, whilst computers can give changing information. This new system would offer all the benefits of the book, coupled with the dynamism of IT.

  Whilst IT might spread into the area of paper publication, the Principal Investigator of MIT Media Lab Research Group Projects, Hiroshi Ishii, is stretching the concept of a computer in another direction. We are all used to dealing with an audio and visual interface – watching the television or using the computer screen. But imagine a world in which we were also used to exploiting the medium of touch for communication. The idea is that as the gap between cyberspace and the physical world is narrowed, and the two become increasingly inter-related, IT will work in more and more areas. As Ishii says: ‘We are seeking ways to turn each state of physical matter – not only solid matter but also liquids and gases – within everyday architectural spaces into “interfaces” between people and digital information.’ So the world itself would become the interface, with the user detached from reliance upon a computer screen. One important factor of these ‘tangible bits’ is that the pressure of fingers could form a touch-based communication system, so that the blind and deaf might be able to transmit thoughts. Not only would such a system help those with visual or auditory impairments, but it would also provide a further dimension for everyone in making the cyber-world ever more ‘real’. Future ‘touch-typing’ courses would actually
entail learning to communicate by the medium of touch itself!

  Think what it might be like to live in the second half of the 21st century, and take a walk around the home. We'll start off in a non-committed space that might be the descendant of the turn-of-the-century living room. As in its 20th-century incarnations, spaces for ‘lounging’ or the even older activity of ‘sitting’ when your body has no immediate requests, no specific physiological function will be catered for here. On the contrary, this is the place to come when all internal drives are sated. As you enter the walls start to glow, because banks of light-emitting diodes are linked to monitors that detect your presence. The precise colours vary, as you voice-activate the wall-control system to change from the colour grey, say, to blue. Eventually you may not even have to speak. As sensors in your body detect that you are becoming agitated the walls will automatically turn a soothing cool hue. Perhaps you wish to superimpose a design, and whisper ‘summer sky' – whereupon some white fluffy clouds waft around the corners and on to the ceiling. Soon you'll be feeling as calm and fresh as if you were truly out of doors. This sensation is all the more immediate thanks to the air-control system, which is filtering out such pollutants as there still are and adding the desired smells of the moment, such as a sea-air sensation that will automatically accompany the ‘summer sky' wrapping around you.

  You breathe deeply and start to feel calmer. Should you feel stressed or on the verge of depression, the shifting chemical landscape of the tissues and fluids of your body will trigger sensors that transmit this information to the surfaces of the walls, which accordingly take on a rosy pink hue. In fact, such relatively crude and definitive feedback is not needed for this transformation to occur – even gestures or voice tone (prosody) will be monitored via a scanning laser range-finder system. As you walk around your movements activate ‘responsive portraits’; some are of your family and friends shimmering in their frames. They smile in greeting as you pass by, and from wherever you turn to them in the room they are sure to be following you with their eyes. Other pictures are holographic, 3D images, which might utter recorded messages as you look at them. They will, of course, automatically mute when the phone rings, or if you issue a voice-instruction, or, perhaps the most improbable of all, begin to hold a conversation in real time.

  But your cyber-reverie is rarely ruptured. You can, after all, trust the computer absolutely with all everyday tasks, such as checking up on your car. The latest engine problem has been remotely detected and corrected by downloading software repairs directly over the internet connection, and you do not really need to oversee such a routine procedure, any more than you have to make any conscious effort to pay. You could, naturally, beam funds into a vending machine, till or bank account by a digital squirt on your mobile. But the issue of automatic payment was settled once you had placed your order. It does not cross your mind that you might have been overcharged. Everyone now uses smart money, which will transfer itself from your account having first ensured you have paid the lowest rate. If not, the car company, like all businesses these days, is aware that the difference will be refunded. In any event money, at least the physical commodity, no longer exists. Spending patterns are monitored and analysed automatically so that no one can get into too much debt and you are always aware of your immediate financial position.

  Untroubled, you move towards the window and smile at the nostalgic memory of the days, which you can just recall, when some people still used curtains or blinds. At a word, the glass darkens with the technology of electrochromism that will, when the world itself darkens outside or on the word of command, convert the transparent glass panes to opaque hues. Then again, you might prefer to instruct that artificial, full-spectrum daylight stream into the room. Another possibility is to distance reality still further and ask the voice-activated window system to display the peak of Mount Everest, a Caribbean beach at sunset or a Cornish lane in springtime.

  In all cases, inside the room you are surrounded by light, but not light bulbs. There are no light fittings as such, no special device that is there solely to emit light. Instead, everything is iridescent and provides subtle pools of illumination of different intensities. Light-emitting polymers, as thin as paper and as flexible as fabric, substitute for conventional coverings for the soft furnishings. You sink into a glowing cyber-chair. Sensors in the chair register your particular sitting pattern, comparing the distribution of pressure from all over your body to the sitting profile programmed previously. The voice system in the chair addresses you by name and advises a change in position that will be better for your spine. But you decide instead to voice-activate the zero-gravity system. Your body acquires the semi-foetal position in which astronauts float. So, now you are floating and you can truly start to relax. You wonder aloud what might be on TV and the sharp image of one of the many digital channels appears on the wall opposite you. You command the image to spread out over the whole surface of the wall opposite, knowing that if you swivelled in your chair the image would be transferred, triggered by movement sensors in the chair, to another wall for optimum viewing from that angle.

  Yet the term ‘TV’ is really now a misnomer, with only the name linking the current system to its distant 20th-century predecessor. There are obvious technical differences, like a sharper image on the screen; high-definition television uses about twice as many lines as the standard 625, with a bandwidth some four times larger than the old PAL system. You can hardly imagine what it must have been like to have been the passive victim of the programme scheduler; that disappeared within the first decade of this century. Interactive TV goes back as long as anyone can remember. Nowadays everyone takes for granted that all films are available through the TV system, whilst you can access programmes as soon as they are made, so that everyone personalizes their own schedules. TV is no longer part of an external reality, a secondhand real life controlled from the outside; instead it is part of your subjective fantasy world, tailored for you, and you alone.

  Not that you need to tailor it much anymore. Your particular preferences are programmed into the system and updated in the light of each schedule you develop, so that increasingly you need not actively deviate from the preselected set of programmes, picked for you by the system; even the adverts cater specifically for your personal predilections. The commercial break has therefore been transformed from the irritating distraction that it used to be into the core method of shopping. After the two-minutes sales pitch you can order the item immediately, by telling the TV to go ahead. Of course, the system already has all the relevant information it needs, from your credit details to your neck measurement.

  But tonight you just want to relax. You whisper ‘3D mode’, and immediately the televised personalities and events come down from the wall and surround you. You are immersed and involved – not least because TV is now intensely interactive. You can choose the camera shots you want, and choose the ending to a drama at a spoken command; tonight you request a romance and reject an unhappy ending. The TV system – partial virtual reality, PVR – operates in parallel with the real reality of your living room. The characters in the programme are like ghosts, fighting and arguing and debating right by your coffee table. Yet your coffee table is still there.

  Yet even the PVR does not manage to dispel your end-of-day angst, and there is always the possibility that someone else in your household might want to share the same physical space. As it did for the bygone commuters of the turn of the century, the answer lies in a miniaturized personal space – a more comprehensive system that nonetheless has clear similarities with the old walkmen and cell phones. In this case, you can blot out the real world by slipping into the micro-environment of the cyber-chair itself. A hood rises up and over your head, surrounding you with sights and sounds that shut out the immediate room. Now fiction is total: virtual reality at its most personal and intimate.

  From the cyber-chair in the living room it is a small step to the cyber-bed in the bedroom. As you yawn and shuffle int
o this next space, you could remark, if indeed it were still remarkable, that most of the systems that make your environment personalized and interactive in the living room are duplicated here. The only difference is that there you were more or less vertical, whereas this is where you come when you wish to be more or less horizontal, for more or less all of the time. The specific activity that happens here is sleep. At a further whispered command, you are led into a world that lures you away from consciousness – the soothing experience of a deserted beach, where the waves rhythmically hiss on to the sand, and suck back again, and again. The sun is fading, and you close your eyes…

  As soon as your body sensors signal to the cyber-bed that you are in the first stages of unconsciousness the beach programme turns off. However, the cyber-bed stays on alert and monitors you throughout the night. If your body temperature becomes too high, then the ambient temperature in the room adjusts accordingly; throughout the night, sensors continue to measure your blood pressure and heart rate, as well as the degree of activity in tossing and turning, and the electrical activity of your brain.

  Every morning you can inspect how you fared whilst asleep, and discover how your health is generally, as you peruse your read-outs from several days. Of course, if there is a problem, there will already be a voice-alert for you to consult the medical services. In the case of an emergency situation, you would, needless to say, have been roused in the night. Once people might have regarded the recording and reporting Of every glitch in your bodily function as a matter of concern: after all, such information could be made available to any accredited third party, or even a hacker. But now it is all as normal as credit checks were a few decades ago. You are used to living if not in the public eye, as some did in the early 21st century, then at least in the eye of an omnipresent and anonymous third party. In fact, you pause for a moment to think how strange it must have been in the past to have led a completely private existence; no one would have known anything about your personal life, but then again much would have been unknown or perhaps baffling to you yourself, and in general you would have had little control over both the immediate and long-term events unfolding within your body and your mind. In some strange way, somehow, it would have felt as if no one really cared – and indeed it must have felt very isolating and lonely as well as unpredictable. You find this prospect of a private life, buffeted around by happenstance from one moment to the next, actually quite frightening.