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Where wireless bits are going, and what to do with them
The Economist's special report on wireless technology a few weeks back yielded some valuable nuggets for anyone interested in bits or bit literacy. As successful as the iPhone is, it's just a drop in the bucket of technologies that will affect all of our lives in the coming years.
For example, one article reports that wireless gadgets are increasingly being slipped inside the human body (reg. req'd). Reporting from the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona:
Bikini-clad waitresses serve drinks to guests as a DJ mixes music from a motorboat perched above the dance floor. But the club made headlines three years ago when it introduced a unique form of entry ticket to its VIP area: a microchip implanted in the patron's arm.
Slightly larger than a grain of rice and enrobed in glass and silicon, the chip is used to identify people when they enter and pay for drinks. It is injected by a nurse with an intimidating syringe under a local anaesthetic. In essence, it is an RFID tag.
Also, from the final article (linked below),...
Prisons in America are experimenting with bracelets that have wireless chips embedded in them to keep track of inmates. It sounds Big Brotherish, but prison officials say that violence among prisoners has decreased. Guards are also tagged, so prisoners may feel safer from abuse.
But what to do with all the data? A sense of things to come (reg. req'd) reports...
What worries engineers most is how to deal with all the data produced by the sensors. “The good news is that you can get all these data; the bad news is that you have to do something with them,” says Kris Pister, the co-founder of Dust Networks.
In the final article in the report, The hidden revolution (reg. req'd), we get a sense of the answer, which should be familiar to readers of my book Bit Literacy:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government has come up with [an] innovative proposal: requiring information to be deleted over time. He describes this as a legal and technical version of human forgetting. Today's computer systems do not do that; tomorrow we may wish they did.
As our infinite data multiplies exponentially into an infinity of bitstreams, it becomes that much more important to let the bits go. (For more, see Chapter 12 and Appendix A of Bit Literacy.)
Interesting subject for certain.
Leads me to point out that it seems digital invention breaks from the "SOP" of thinking up new stuff in a quite radical way: - usually, you come across a specific problem and then invent a solution, but with all these digital ideas and doohickeys it looks like they're invented by imaginative insiders who have no idea what they're good for (which can be OK, when they asked Faraday what his discovery, electrical induction, would be good for, he replied "To what use is a baby?"), and then we, the outsiders who, on the other hand, have no idea how these things work, have to find out how to use them.
In a sort-of radical turn on sorting out bits, we may have to get better at discarding bit-producing machines, at least until the bits they emit are good for something real and can be managed - sometimes it seems like the digital inventions are being put to use because we are just afraid to call'em "emperor's new clothes"...