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Visionaries have a plan for life beyond the dull PC
Wednesday, July 21, 1999
By TOM PAULSON
A small group of subversives who want to eliminate personal computers from every home in America has been meeting quietly in Seattle this week.
The goal of the meeting, sponsored jointly by the University of Washington and Microsoft, is to chart a path that will take us to the day when your refrigerator decides when to order the milk or your wristwatch does more than today's most powerful PC. Or other things yet unimaginable.
"What we really want to do is get computers out of people's way," said Gaetano Borriello, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.
"You shouldn't have to turn the computer on, log in and press all these buttons to get it to perform a simple task," Borriello said. Computers increasingly dictate human behavior, he said: "It's totally out of control."
Borriello and fellow insurgent Turner Whitted of Microsoft Research are the ringleaders in this movement to help humans triumph over computers.
Joined by about 40 top scientists and engineers from other seedbeds of intellectual unrest including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Tech, IBM, Xerox, Intel and Hewlett Packard, these digital revolutionaries are meeting all week to explore "Technologies of Invisible Computing."
After two days of presenting individual ideas and discussing obstacles at the UW, they move today to the Inn at Semi-ah-Moo, near the Canadian border, where smaller groups will study the tasks necessary to rid the world of the personal computer.
"PCs are general purpose machines," Borriello noted. For that reason, he said, they're good for many things, not excellent at any one thing and way too complicated for most daily household or office uses.
There have been plenty of stories, and Star Trek episodes, that describe the concept of invisible computing. A few technologies today give a glimpse of the goal -- the "smart" room where lights and music turn on when a person enters or the personal digital assistant with wireless Internet access.
But all these examples, say Borriello and Whitted, are largely based on the PC mentality in which users have to direct an otherwise passive system to make something happen and the exchange of information is still too complex.
"You want these devices to do things automatically, simply," Borriello said. "They have to talk to each other, take in new information and, in some cases, anticipate what you need and do it without asking you about it."
The question isn't simply about how to improve computing, Whitted said.
"It's about the movement of data," he said, about moving it in completely new ways that won't depend upon people having to learn new skills or change habits.
Except perhaps for privacy concerns associated with computers autonomously handling personal information, invisible computing sounds fine and good. So what's the holdup?
"This is exciting stuff, but to make it work is incredibly difficult," said David Culler, a professor of computer science at UC-Berkeley.
One problem is information management, Culler said. If the smart house of the future has 1,000 or so mini-computers each with specific tasks, he asked, how will all this information be managed -- sorted, turned on and off?
"Without proper management, the world we're talking about will be like those Furbees (toys) . . . They keep talking and talking until eventually you just lock them up in the closet to get them to shut up," Culler said.
Another obstacle often not considered in the trend toward miniaturization in computing is the question of power sources, Whitted noted. Each of these devices will need power, he said, and nobody wants to change 1,000 tiny batteries in their house or wear a device that generates too much heat.
Dan Russell, from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), said it's important to think not so much about what's possible as what's desirable.
Russell told a story about Porsche equipping its car with a computerized sensor in its gas tank aimed at protecting the engine from the damage of running on fumes. A driver went around a curve, the gasoline sloshed to one side, the sensor said the tank was empty and the car slowly shut itself down.
After making some frustrated calls, Russell said, the driver learned the only way he could re-start the car was to reboot the system -- something that could only be done at the dealership.
"It was not the user experience Porsche wanted the driver to have," Russell said.
In addition to concerns about information management, power sources and the "user interface" in invisible computing, participants identified many other technical and social obstacles that need to be hurdled before this vision becomes a reality.
Information transfer in most cases will need to be wireless, and a number of experts said this will require innovative methods to protect privacy.
Eugene Shih, a newly minted UW computer science and engineering grad who is working at Microsoft before heading to MIT this fall, said he's working on a system that uses the human skin's natural electrical conductivity to transmit information through signals that aren't broadcast but limited to the body.
"That would aid in privacy," Shih said. "The goal of all this is make our lives simpler. Right now in computing, that's not the case."
Gary Starkweather, the man who invented the laser printer, said the value of the UW/Microsoft Summer Institute on invisible computing is in bringing together experts who don't normally intersect -- software programmers with hardware designers, networkers with operating systems gurus.
Starkweather, who developed the laser printer while at Xerox and who is now with Whitted at Microsoft Research, knows only too well the value of getting people to think outside the box.
"I tried to develop something new within an engineering organization in which people are mostly focused on improving on what they've got and cutting production costs," he said. "That's why I got in hot water."
When Starkweather in 1967 presented his idea for laser printing, his superiors at Xerox told him to "stop fooling around and get back to work." The idea went nowhere until 1970 when Xerox launched its new research arm, PARC, to support creative research.
Starkweather got a transfer to PARC and the laser printer was developed.
"You need the exchange of new ideas and different perspectives," he said. "That's what this meeting is all about."
To incorporate computerization into our daily lives so it operates seamlessly, automatically and invisibly. Also known as "ubiquitous," "pervasive" or "universal" computing.
Near-term applications
Future applications
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattle-pi.com
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