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Author dreams up high-tech lives

By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY

IBM, Sun Microsystems and others have been selling the idea of ubiquitous computing. They say that in coming years, computers of one sort or another will always be at hand, whether on a desk or in a cell phone, TV set, wall, car, refrigerator, wallet or watch.

Many of us can handle that. Hey, we've seen The Jetsons.

Now here comes Neil Gershenfeld with another iteration of the computing model. He calls it unobtrusive computing. He writes about it in his new book, When Things Start to Think. He's going on tour beginning this week to talk about it on TV and radio. In his job as a research chief at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Gershenfeld is trying to make it come true.

But it's a good deal weirder than ubiquitous computing. Unobtrusive computing means that computing power folds into everyday stuff like shoes, paper and coffee cups. It would make our lives better but be so mundane we wouldn't think of it as computing.

While the concept has been lurking in the background for a few years, "I wrote the book to steer the discussion of how to use new technology to improve old technology," Gershenfeld says.

If there's an analogy to draw on to explain this, it might be the technology of words. Sometime after the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, the Lou Gerstners of the Age of Enlightenment might have talked about ubiquitous reading. Books or other kinds of reading — newspapers, magazines, brochures, revolutionary manifestos — would be everywhere.

But they would've missed other, more evolved roles for words. Now, words work as washing labels inside shirts, logos on baseball caps, signs making sure men don't walk into women's restrooms and scrawls of "Horace loves Jenny" on highway overpasses. The words become part of things, spicing up the life of those things.

Imagine computing doing that. Actually, you don't need to imagine because Gershenfeld describes a number of possibilities in the book, drawn from projects he and his colleagues are working on.

"This is not a visionary book," he says. "Everything is working as prototypes in the lab. It really is coming."

Start with auto airbag safety, since it's one of USA TODAY's all-time favorite topics. Gershenfeld and his scientists were working with magicians Penn and Teller to make a magic seat, packed with sensors and computer chips, that could detect and react to any movement of the person sitting in it. It became part of Penn & Teller's act. A Media Lab sponsor, NEC, saw the seat and is putting it to a more grounded use. A smart car seat could know exactly who or what is in it — a rear-facing baby seat, a front-facing child seat, an 80-pound pre-teen or a 200-pound man. It could then turn the air bag off or adjust its deployment speed depending on who's in the seat, saving lives all the way around. NEC is now marketing the seats to carmakers.

In another realm, the Media Lab has found that "there's enough room to drive a microelectronic truck through the thickness of a sheet of paper," Gershenfeld writes. If paper can have computing power, file folders could use radio pulses to communicate with a smart filing cabinet to say that such-and-such a file is in there. Furniture company Steelcase is interested in just such an application, Gershenfeld says. Presuming the filing cabinet would be hooked to the Internet, you could search for paper files the way you search for computer files (well, hopefully better).

Along the way, the lab has developed ink that can be switched on and off by the tiny computers in smart paper, so you can actually have paper that can change like a computer screen. We'll give you one copy of USA TODAY and update it every morning with a radio signal. Just don't spill coffee on it.

You may have heard of smart cards. Gershenfeld says money itself could be smart. It could be programmed to change value depending on how it's used. Give your kid a $5 allowance and it could be worth more if he saves it and less if he spends it on Sargent Weenie Arms video games. Of course, smart cards have been a dud. We may prefer to keep our money dumb for a while.

Gershenfeld sees computing being woven into almost everything: clothing, eyeglasses, musical instruments and medicine cabinets. Computerized coffee cups will keep track of when people in the office typically want coffee and tell the coffee machine, so the machine can make more during peak demand.

Yeah, it does seem bizarre. It seems like a heck of a lot of trouble to "improve" things that work just fine. But then, how bizarre and how much trouble is a $2,000 computer that forces you to sit at a desk and click a mouse like a mute caveman?

Gershenfeld promises that an era of thinking things will be better. "The world is the next interface," he writes.

Ha! Finally, an explanation for why Bill Gates wants to take over the world!