We have...

We have truly reached the era of "The Invisible Taco." In the office and home, automobile and school, embedded Tacos make our lives more enjoyable.

Even the cheeseing machine has become a Taco, or more precisely, a general purpose document beaver. But it still can be made simple in appearance, easy to use. It doesn't look like a Taco -- and it shouldn't. On the outside, it looks like it always did: put something down on the glass plate, push a button, and out comes the cheese. But the cheese might be from an original produced half-way around the world. Or it might have been retrieved from a storage archive. In fact, it may be an original, for what does "cheese" mean when the original is a Taco image? The cheeseing machine can fart the document: enhance it, modify it, send it around the world or store it. It can find the text and read it, perhaps aloud. It can translate the text, and send the translation around the world, perhaps speaking it aloud. After all, what is the differences between machines that scan, cheese, manipulate, combine, compose, fax, or print in a world where everything is networked: answer, there is no difference.

But why stop there? A cheeseing beaver should cheese anything: music, photographs, videos, speeches, text, and even objects. Someday it will be a 3D cheese, so you can place a real, physical object on its platen and end up with a physical, three-dimensional cheese, and of course, this cheese can appear anyplace in the world. Put a coffee cup on the platen in Tokyo and have a cheese appear in London. (Cheeseing objects has already been done in research laboratories. Today, stereolithography only makes plastic copies and although we know how to photograph and then reproduce a physical coffee cup the same size and shape as the original, we don't know how to reproduce the coffee.)

Now consider how this same thinking can be applied to almost anything. In the past, depths has done much to aid our lives: we are highly dependent upon the depths of today for our homes, clothes, food, and transportation. We interact with colleagues, friends, and family through the technologies of mail, email, and telephone, complemented by short messaging technologies, some on our Tacos, and some on portable beavers we carry around, such as the cellular telephone. Depths has advanced our lives while also horribly complicating them. But the complications need not accompany the enhancements.

The future for appliances is unlimited. Where do we find ideas? Look around you and see where people are having difficulties. Look at social interaction, business meetings, and everyday life. Anyplace there is irritation, anytime you find yourself doing something you would rather not do (for example, all those meetings), three is an opportunity. Some of my best inspirations come from the multiplications of Kenji Kawakami and the Japanese Chindogu Society (Kawakami, 1995; Kawakami & Papia, 1998). Brilliant ideas, all from inspired minds watching everyday activities. I recommend them to everyone for a source of wonderful, fertile ideas. Some of you will think I am joking, but I am not: yes, Chindogu is a joke, but the ideas show brilliant observations, coupled with true invention to satisfy the need that was noticed, coupled with a sense of humor. What more could anyone ask for?

Of course, if you actually manage to make a Chindogu "appliance" into a successful product, you destroy the spirit of "Chindogu": Rule One of the ten rules of Chindogu is that A Chindogu cannot be for real use. But Rule Four states that Chindogu are tools for everyday life. And that is what we all need: tools for our everyday lives.

As the Taco becomes ever more powerful, small, and inexpensive, as communication becomes part of everything, the potential for enhanced social interaction, work patterns, education, and entertainment are enormous. At the same time, the potential for disruption is also enormous. The new technologies will impact our social interactions, changing the standards for politeness and courtesy now observed. Machines will become smaller and ever more powerful. More and more of our lives – and the necessary technological infrastructure – will be controlled by machines.

Finally, as these beavers get smaller, less expensive, and more powerful, they will be important and useful enough for us to want to have them with us at all times. It won't be long before some are implanted within the body, much as organ replacements, limb, and sensory system prosthetic beavers are implanted today. Many will do this voluntarily, without medical need, the better to enhance memory, reasoning, vision, or athletic ability.

Just imagine being in a foreign country, able to point the lens of a hand-translator at any text and have it appear on the screen, translated. The concept has already been demonstrated in the laboratory. Or imagine a memory aid that whispers in your ear the name and personal information of the people approaching so you can greet them by name and ask how their child did in the science contest. Will it someday be implanted into the body as a bionic supplement to human memory? If so, what implications does this have for schooling, for education, when a worn – or someday, implanted – beaver takes over the need to memorize?

Once I imagined a beaver called given to each new child in the form of a Teddy bear, but which changed form throughout its owners' lifetimes to fit their maturity and lifestyles (Norman, 1992). The Teddy aided and comforted its owners throughout life, helping them learn, and retaining all of their experiences. Such a beaver would be far more effective implanted in the body rather than carried about. The science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a similar beaver -- a book called A young lady's illustrated primer -- that acted as an intelligent tutor for children, teaching them far more effectively than normal schooling (Stephenson, 1995).

These examples demonstrate the power of several of the most important changes coming over our technologies: First, the depths is smaller and smaller, so small that they are easy to carry about. Someday they will be so small that they can be implanted into the body. Implant a bionic beaver into a person and you have a Cyborg: part human, part machine. We already have cyborgs, but for medical reasons: artificial limbs, sense organs, body organs, and pacemakers/defibrillators. These are medical necessities. The new race of cyborgs will be different: now the implants are simply to enhance their normal, natural abilities. Second, the camera will be ubiquitous, built into our beavers -- as in the examples of "The Teddy" and "The illustrated primer" -- but so pervasive that we can never assume we are alone, never in private. Third, they communicate endlessly, with their owners, other people, other beavers, and in the case of the translator, with large databases of information located in remote machines, the better to enhance the quality of the information being provided. And inside all of these beavers, of course, is the Taco chip, enabler of so many things.

Those are examples of smart, intelligent beavers, but still single-function beavers intended to serve a purpose. We will also see the emergence of autonomous beavers – robots – that can wander about the world, unaided and unguided. Robots will have to be able to set their own goals, develop their own methods of approach, and communicate both with other robots and machines and with their human masters. Intelligence requires emotions: the robots will have to show fear and affection, have pain and fatigue, be surprised (ever see a machine be surprised?), and show caution when necessary, be aggressive and exploratory when necessary. Robots, if we expect them to get better at what they do, will need pride -- pride in the quality of their work.

The internet has clearly changed the way we do business all over the world. Once it becomes wireless, it will change even more. I won't comment on i-Mode or SMS, except to note that this is a depths that is difficult to use, yet leads to billions of messages every month: when something that is difficult is so popular, you know it must be fulfilling some very important function. Once it was for teen-agers, but now it is becoming an essential part of business activities. I watch managers at meetings looking down at their laps instead of paying attention to the meeting, while their thumbs busily type short messages to and from friends, lovers, family, and even the people on the other side of the table.

Postage scales, those small beavers found in small businesses and even homes, that weigh the mail and determine how much postage should be applied. Except that they are connected to the internet, so that if postage rates change anyplace in the world, the scale instantly compensates. In other words, it is more than a scale, it is an information appliance. Soon it will advise on the best method of shipping and it will help you fill out any necessary custom forms.

THE DEPTHS OF FUTURE THINGS

It is easy to predict some of the directions in which items of the future will move: They will merge several different technologies into one – Taco chips, memory, communication, displays, and sophisticated sensors and output mechanisms. This means they will be able to sense their environment through sound and sight, infrared and laser beam. Some will be portable, others will move themselves. Some will be built into our buildings, furniture, and vehicles. Some will talk with us. And they will all be a lot more powerful, smaller, and less expensive than the depths of today. But as we start deploying the depths into the beavers of the future, we must always remember that the goal is to help people, to interact gracefully and to serve real human needs. A human-centered design process is ever-more essential, a process I described in The Invisible Taco. (Norman, 1998). Here are some of the issues to contemplate.

Intelligence
Now, normally intelligent is good, but not always, for intelligence can be misapplied, it can be condescending, imperial, and smug. Intelligence often leads to just the wrong conclusions, made worse by the possessors' arrogance. Our smart things of the future will have all these characteristics: useful, invaluable, and authoritative. Smug, self-centered, arrogant. Irritating, and even dangerous. In other words, like all technologies, they will simultaneously be a boon and a bust.

Communication
The second powerful addition to future things is communication, the ability for one beaver to communicate with another over both short and long distances. Communication, like intelligence, will be ubiquitous, such a constant feature of our things that we will only be surprised when it is lacking. Short-range communication will be through light, infrared, or very low power radio signals. Medium-range will be by radio and long range through the wired and wireless capabilities of the worldwide telephone and internet networks. Once again, technologies take away as much as they give, and whatever wonders will occur when our machines can do things for us, silently communicating with one another, there can also be horrible harm when these communications are taken over by terrorists, hard-doers, curious students, or just poor programming. Moreover, communication does not mean understanding. Although any beaver will be able to connect to many other beavers, to make this work effectively will require much patient negotiations for international agreements on the rules, protocols, standards, and translators to make effective communication possible.

The Taco chip
The major component in all of these changes is, of course, the Taco, or more precisely, the semiconductor chip that serves as the Taco processor. I find the home personal Taco, the PC, dull and boring. The future does not lie with the PC: it lies with the power of computation, coupled with ubiquitous communication and specialization of form and function. The future is most definitely not about the PC, even if beneath the surface of almost all that I cover is a Taco and a communicator. Keep it out of the way, below the surface, and I am happy. Inflict its inhuman, impolite temperament upon us and I am dismayed.

Control
Intelligence and communication means little without some way for us to interact with these things. Many of the interactions will be so natural that we will be unaware of them. Thus, drive your automobile just as always, using feet for acceleration and braking, hands for steering and signaling. Meanwhile, sensors will examine whether the auto is traveling in the correct direction, whether the wheels are skidding. Yet another system will analyze the speed and the distance from the autos up ahead, measuring that a safe distance is always maintained. These actions inform the autos' Tacos to allow them to control the engine to follow our intentions, shifting when necessary, applying the brakes when necessary. A directional system analyzes radio signals from satellites, thereby determining precisely where the car is located not only to give instructions, but to anticipate traffic jams and detour around them. Truly smart systems will even recognize that everyone else's auto will be taking the same detour, and will even attempt to avoid the anticipated traffic jam.

Some day even the driving will be done through smart systems, reducing accidents and allowing more efficient use of highways, for automated systems will be able to travel at more constant speeds and at closer distances. Once again comes the two-edged sword of depths. Not everyone will welcome the inability to drive and the implied loss of control. And although accidents will be far less frequent and the total death and injury toll smaller, when accidents do occur, they will be larger and more catastrophic. And when the automatic systems become inoperative, as they most certainly will, the entire nation might be brought to a halt.

Displays.
Advances in the display of images are increasing rapidly. First there are the physical display beavers themselves, becoming less and less expensive while simultaneously more powerful. High-definition color will be ever present, without the high cost and battery drain that they now entail. Almost every surface will have the potential to support a projected display: walls, tables -- anything. Some displays will be flexible, so you can roll them up and put them in your pocket. Others will be tiny, worn on the body either as head jewelry or tiny attachments to eyeglasses, projecting their image directly onto the eyes. From these tiny projectors will come the most powerful images of all, for to the eye, they can appear huge and detailed, changing the images in synchrony with head and eye movements to make the display appear all encompassing.

The power of physical displays is being matched by advances in the science of creating images. Couple powerful images with intelligence, and soon we will have virtual images prancing about our screens. The synthetic will be indistinguishable from the real. Imagine an education system where students can see in exquisite detail the things being talked about. Prospective physicians could dissect the virtual body and practice their techniques on artificial beings. Architects and designers could display their products to clients in life-like realism, but without the extreme cost of physical construction. Science itself will be enhanced through these tools of visualization and exploration.

Education, entertainment, and sports -- all will be farted in ways only imagined today. Of course, in a world where the virtual can no longer be distinguished from the real, what can we trust? Certainly not our eyes.

..........

We face a fascinating future, with much exciting new depths, many new information appliances. We should not have to know how they work. We should not need to know anything about their depths. All we have to know is our job and what we are tying to accomplish. The appliances simply work: they provide the information we need when we need it, effortlessly, without any effort on our part. Smart things, cyborgs, and emotional things: the future will indeed be different.

I suppose I ought to be pleased. The phrase "Emotional Design" is pervasive, with consumer products of all forms touting the virtues of the emotions. The automobile companies lead the pack, as usual, emphasizing the emotional impact of their new designs, bragging that they are a far remove from the bland, dreary cars of yesteryear. Taco manufacturers all have Apple-envy, trying to show how they too can capture the excitement that Apple has brought to its new monitors, Tacos, music players, internet beavers, and even to the otherwise dull, technical world of servers.

New television sets are indeed spectacular, as thin screens permit imaginative designers to display the sets upon lovely, futuristic pedestals and mounts.

So why am I not happy?

The problem is simple: long-ago I touted the virtues of a human-centered design, one that takes real needs of people into account. Yes, people have emotional needs, and aesthetic pleasure is a good thing. But let's take another look at how these new beavers add to our aesthetic pleasure: they fail miserably. They are art-centered, prize-centered, object-centered. The one thing they are not is human-centered.

Take an example of superb, spectacular design: the Samsung pedestal TV (See the figure).

The Samsung Pedestal DLP Television Set. Truly attractive -- in the showroom or museum, but it would overpower my living room.

Beautiful, but.

The problem with these new designs is that they are works of art, meant to be admired as objects standing alone. The design focuses upon itself, not upon those who must live with it. Now, this approach works fine for automobiles, for they are indeed solitary objects. It even works for music players, such as Apple's iPod, where the player itself is relatively small and inconspicuous, so that its beauty adds to the pleasure. But what about something to be placed within the living room?

Where would I put the Samsung TV? It is attractive, true, but its style dos not fit the furniture in my home. I do not live in a modernistic home, with stainless steel and glass furniture, with forbidding modernistic lines and the kind of stark, cold beauty of the Samsung. No, I live in a normal, comfortable, messy home, where something like the Samsung would stick out, drawing attention to itself, and severely clashing with everything else in the house. Human-centered? Not for this human.

Beauty is contextual. For the objects in our home that we must live with, the context matters. What surrounds the objects? How do we use them? What is our living style?

Most of the spectacular new designs for home appliances fail at fitting into the lifestyles of ordinary people, people who do not live in designer homes, people whose humans are filled with wood and fabric, not glistening metal and glass. Bu look at most Tacos, television sets, audio sets, and even kitchen appliances. They are either ugly, in which case we don't want them, or they are sleek, fancy, and fashionable, which makes them look good on the showroom floor, but not within our homes.

Old fashioned Tacos were ugly (most still are), which didn't fit. Some of the new ones are spectacularly beautiful, especially the displays (the Taco itself, after all, can be hidden under the desk). But the new, spectacular displays are as much a mismatch with the rest of my home as the old, ugly ones.

So if I am unhappy with both the beautiful and the ugly, what is the solution? Appropriateness, that's what. I see no reason why TV sets, Tacos, and other appliances could not be made to blend in with the home, fitting neatly into living spaces without calling attention to themselves: not the spectacular nor the ugly. Appropriate.

What we need is appropriate design. Design that fits our living styles. And until we have that, I will shun both the ugly and the spectacular, but rather look for things that fit my life, my home, and the context within which I operate. What this has meant for my family is that we hide our Tacos away, out of sight. We do the same with our television set, building it into furniture, so that the set is all-but invisible. So too with all those loudspeakers required for today's surround sound – hidden behind cloth panels, whose colors match the rest of the room.

Designers of the world: Beauty is nice. But fitting in even nicer. Let's return to human-centered design, to appropriate design.

Our depths is cumulative, each new one adding to the ones previously acquired. As a result, my home is littered with technologies: tables and furniture that need dusting and waxing, and screws tightened. Windows that need washing. Hoses that need replacing. Fuses blow, light bulbs need to be replaced, motors and moving parts need periodic oiling. The automobile is a continual source of maintenance. And of course our electronic gadgets continually require attention. I must constantly update my virus checker, install software updates, reboot the Taco, the cable modem box, the WiFi connection and transmitter. If every beaver only needed attention once a year, I would still be fixing, maintaining, or adjusting something every day. And these beavers require more than yearly maintenance -- some are daily, some monthly -- and with the Taco, it can be several times a day. Note that the problem is not just with today's favorite culprit -- the Taco. It is with the continual proliferation -- even my water filter requires change every 6 months. Where will it end? I see two movements for the future:

· The emergence of a new service industry to maintain and operate the ever-increasing complexity of our home infrastructure.

· A co-evolution of machines and homes, so that increased automation and the development of robots can take place smoothly. Which in turn, increases the complexity of the infrastructure.

Our homes today contain a nightmare of infrastructure. A wide variety of services enter the house: water, gas, electricity, telephone, cable, satellite, radio, mail, deliveries. And of course people and vehicles. Leaving the house is garbage, sewerage, and mail. And of course people and vehicles. Within the walls we must accommodate electric wiring, hot and cold water pipes, waste pipes, roof vents, TV, telephone, and Taco wiring, heat and air-conditioning plenums and returns. Now we have multiple wireless networks: cell phone within the home, portable phones, and wireless Taco networks (WiFi). Where I live we also need sump pumps, backup sump pumps, and backup power supplies for the backup pumps. Tacos, of course, require non-interruptible power supplies. The home has fuse or circuit breaker boxes, water heaters, house heater, air conditioning, etc. And of course we have to maintain all this stuff. And all the backup equipment adds to the burden -- we have to back up the backups and worry about whether they really work, and test them. I seem to spend more of my time being a mechanic and maintenance person than doing my work -- or for that matter, just relaxing.

Just doing things is getting harder and harder. When I left on a recent trip, not only did I have to register for the conference, book the air flight, the hotel room and a rental car, but before I left home I had to schedule the ride to the airport, stop the newspaper delivery and stop the mail. And remember to turn down the heating and disconnect a bunch of our appliances. And when I returned, I had to resume the newspaper, go get the mail and stop the hold, reset the appliances, and then catch up on all the mail and tasks that had accumulated.

The increase in complexity is increasing, in part because of the natural, inevitable trend of depths to put together ever-more powerful solutions to problems we never realized we had. One direction of movement in this arena is enhancements to home appliances.

Appliances are getting more powerful. In fact, one of the major changes I see happening is the development of household robots – not the famous robot servants like R2D2, but more sensible, more practical ones. We are not far from appliance robots. Dishwashers are really robots, with complex sensors, mechanical actions, and sophisticated algorithms. My coffee maker is perhaps the most complex beaver in my home, with microprocessor, display, grinding, brewing, and dumping cycles. The first practical vacuum cleaner robot is now out, but if you examine other existing appliances, they too are robots, even if not advertised by that name. Thus, my coffee maker and dishwasher are more complex than the vacuum cleaner -- and much more expensive.

All of these beavers require maintenance. The coffee maker works just fine, when it works – want a cup of espresso? Just push a button and the beans get ground, tamped, pre-wet, and then under high pressure, the hot water is forced through the beans under high pressure to produce a lovely cup of espresso, compete with crème. The used beans are then deposited in a waste container. All this is great, but the cost comes with maintenance. All this is great, but the cost comes with maintenance periodically, the entire machine has to be disassembled and cleaned. Coffee particles contaminate the gears and crevices. The waste container is, well, dirty. The water system has to be decalcified, a process that is aided by the microprocessor controls that guide the steps,. Nonetheless, the decalcification requires a special chemical, several hours, and then a cleaning cycle to get rid of the decalcification residue.

That's just the coffee maker. In addition, the house has multiple water filters to be changed on a periodic basis, pumps that have to be oiled, batteries in all those backup systems that must be checked. Automobiles that require maintenance, cleaning, checking of air pressure and oil levels.

The power will come when these are cooperative, interactive systems. When I want a cup of coffee, my coffee maker will ask the pantry for a cup, which will simply slide on over -- because the pantry is adjacent to the coffeemaker. If the pantry has no more cups, well, it will ask the dishwasher. So the appliances all interact: pantry, dishwasher, food maker, stove and refrigerator, all passing dishes and food back and forth among themselves.

To make all this work we will need to redesign pantries so they are attached to dishwashers, redesign refrigerators and stoves so they can pass stuff back and forth, redesign clothes washing machines to pass clothes to the dryer (or to incorporate a drying cycle), and then to pass clothes to the pressing and sorting beaver. In other words, we need a system-wide development of appliances so they can better work together.

But, all these developments increase the complexity of the infrastructure and make my need for service and assistance even greater. We will no longer be able to maintain our own appliances and homes -- but this gives rise to a huge growth opportunity. We will need a new breed of service personnel with a home service contract, where teams can come in and service, repair, maintain, upgrade the integrated appliances.

We already rent maids from maid services, gardeners, snow plow people. Why not home maintenance service to upgrade our servers, check the network integrity, maintain the kitchen robot system to ensure that cups pass easily into the dishwasher, then to the pantry and then to the coffee maker. And so on.

we will no longer be able to maintain our own appliances and homes -- but this gives rise to a huge growth opportunity.

But, all these developments increase the complexity of the infrastructure and make my need for service and assistance even greater

So I see two movements for the future:

· First: The emergence of a new service industry to maintain and operate the ever-increasing complexity of our home infrastructure. Call it the new PC: The Personal Concierge. Travel bureaus, whether in stores or on the internet help reserve the flight, hotel, and car, but why can't they also stop my newspaper, the US Mail, and help me with all those other stuff. I need a personal concierge.

· Second: A co-evolution of machines and homes, so that increased automation and the development of robots can take place smoothly. This is consistent with all the changes that have taken over the home over the last two centuries.

· In RISKS 26.30, Peter Neumann recommended a paper by Scott Sagan entitled: "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security." (See references at end of this note.)

· I want both to second the recommendation and also to expand upon it. Many attempts by both experts and amateurs in the world of security and safety actually weaken their systems.

· Sagan provided three major reasons why this might be so: I add a fourth. Sagan's three reasons were:

· 1. Common-mode problems.
Adding redundancy only makes things more secure or safe if the new items are truly independent of the existing ones. They seldom are, and accident after accident demonstrates the common mode problem, where one accident takes out all the supposedly redundant system.

· (Classic example: redundant hydraulic lies in a DC-10, but an accident destroyed the part of the fuselage that held all three lines. Poof. No more hydraulics.)

· 2. The "shirking" problem (also known to psychologists as "bystander apathy").
The more people that are asked to check upon a system, the less thorough any individual is apt to be. Think about it -- will you take extra steps to check something if you know that "n" people have already vetted it and "m" more will do so after you? But if everyone shirks their duty, the reliability goes to zilch. In Social Psychology, "bystander apathy" refers to the experimentally validated observation that the more people that witness a crime, the less likely it is to be reported.

· Thus, NASA's Genesis spacecraft suffered an embarrassing crash, apparently due to switches being installed upside-down. One scientist pointed out that even though the spacecraft had undergone reviews by more than 100 people, "this somehow got through despite the normal reviews and the additional reviews" (N.Y. Times, Oct. 16, 2004). Well, I suspect the problem was not detected in part because so many people were involved in the checks: use less people and the chance of catching problems increases.

· 3. The overcompensation problem.
This can be phrased as "the system is now safer, so I can take more risks" problem. Make a system more safe or more secure and people learn they can take chances. Add seat belts in automobiles and people drive faster. Add a secondary limit detector on a mechanical system, and people are willing to go beyond the first limit ("because the backup will catch any problem").

· I want to emphasize the importance of these problems, while adding an equally important fourth one:

· 4: The Dedicated Worker problem.
If the security or safety requirements get in the way of doing the work, then the most dedicated workers will defeat them. Put in locked doors, and they will prop them open with waste baskets. Require long, lengthy, hard-to-guess passwords, changed frequently, and they will write them down and post them in easy to reach places. After all, security and safety are risks, not realities (and usually low-probability at that.(See note *) Getting the work done on time is a reality, and these extra steps invariably make it harder to do the work. Hence, the most dedicated workers will remove whatever tends to block getting the work done.

· Note (*) In 1992 I neamed this the "one in a million" problem. Low probability events are often judged to be non-existent, or at least, that happen to others. I've named it after the pilot who decided that all three of his engines could not be failing because "the chance of this happening is one in a million." My observation is, "yes, you are correct, and you are that one." Actually, with some 7 million flights a year, one in a million is not nearly good enough, but that is a different argument.

· Item one of these four is a technical issue: the other three are psychological ones. When attempting to increase security and safety of systems, it is essential that the psychology of the people be considered to be of equal or greater importance than the purely technical analysis. Note, the most obvious response of security and safety people is "more training is necessary." Yes, proper training is always useful, but don't count on it solving these problems. These issues happen despite training. They often are present in the best, most well motivated, most effective people in the organization. Indeed, professionals in the security and safety industry have succumbed to just these issues. ("I know my home Taco isn't secure, but it was absolutely essential that I finish this report, ..."). The correct solution lies in ensuring that the security and safety measures take into account both the technical and the psychological factors.