I sometimes wonder whether the folks at the MIT Media Lab are pulling our legs.
It seems that a lot of energy at the prestigious lab (which claims to be "inventing the future") has gone into the redesign of the American kitchen. For example, one project involved training a glass counter top
to assemble the ingredients for making fudge by reading electronic tags on jars of mini-marshmallows and chocolate chips, then coordinating their quantities with a recipe on a computer and directing a microwave oven to cook it.
Dr. Andrew Lippman, associate director of the Media Lab, said that "my dream tablecloth would actually move the things on the table. You throw the silver down on it, and it sets the table."
One waits in vain for the punch line. These people actually seem to be serious. And the millions of dollars they consume look all too much like real money. Then there are the corporate sponsors, falling all over themselves to throw yet more money at these projects.
Nowadays this kind of adolescent silliness is commonly given the halo of a rationale that has become respected dogma. After all, don't many inventions find unexpected uses in fields far removed from their first application, and doesn't a spirit of play often give rise to productive insight?
Certainly. But somehow it doesn't all add up.
In the first place, the likelihood of serendipitous benefits is not a convincing justification for trivializing the immediate application of millions of research dollars. No one would argue that non-trivial research is less likely to produce valuable off-shoots than trivial research, so why start with triviality?
In the second place, the Media Lab researchers voice their comic lines with a strange seriousness and fervor, devoid of the detachment underlying a true spirit of play. Michael Hawley, an associate professor of media technology at MIT, laments that the kitchen is
where you have the most complex human interactions and the most convoluted schedule management and probably the least use of new technologies to help you manage it all.
And of this degrading backwardness Lippman adds:
Right now, your toaster doesn't talk to your television set, and your refrigerator doesn't talk to your stove, and none of them talk to the store and tell you to get milk on your way home. It's an obvious place screaming out for connectivity.
Those sponsors must love it. Where else but in an academic computing laboratory could they possibly find adult human beings seriously willing to propose such laughable things in order to start creating an artificial need where none was recognized before? By slow degrees the laughable becomes conventional.
Which explains why those corporate sponsors don't appear to be just waiting around for the occasional, serendipitous "hit." Clearly, they see the entire trivial exercise as itself somehow integral to their own success. I don't doubt their judgment in this at all.
Thirdly, there are signs of a pathological flight from reality in all this. Hawley tells us that
in time, kitchens and bathrooms will monitor the food we eat so closely that health care will disappear. We will move from a world in which the doctor gets a pinprick of data every blue moon to the world in which the body is online.
"Health care will disappear." If his words are meant to be taken even half seriously, this is a man with severely impaired judgment and with the most tenuous connection to reality. One wonders how many of these kitchen technicians have ever done some serious gardening, and how many of them can even grasp the possibility that preparing food might be an important and satisfying form of work—at least as satisfying as interacting with the digital equipment they would inflict on the rest of us (and, for that matter, a lot healthier).
No, the kind of fluff the Media Lab all too often advertises is not really comic. Looked at in its social context, it is sick and obscene. It is sick because of the amount of money spent on superficialities; it is sick because of the way corporate sponsors have been able to buy themselves an "academic" facility at a major educational institution to act as their "Consumer Preparation Department"; and it is sick because a straight-faced press corps slavishly reports these "inventions of the future" without ever administering the derisive smile so much of this stuff begs for.
The above quotes, by the way, come from the New York Times (Hamilton 1999). The author of the article does at least quietly give notice that Hawley is "a bachelor who rarely uses his kitchen." Hardly surprising. The man's passion has a lot more to do with computing for its own sake than with entering into the meaning and significance of the food preparer's task.
The idea at work in all this has seized the engineer's imagination with all the force of a logical necessity. In fact, you could almost say that the idea is the idea of logical necessity—the necessity of embedding little bits of silicon logic in everything around us. What was once the feverish dream of spooks and spies—to plant a "bug" in every object—has been enlarged and re-shaped into the millennial dream of ubiquitous computing. In this new dream, of course, the idea of a bug in every software-laden object carries its own rather unpleasant overtones. But unpleasant overtones are not what the promoters of ubiquitous computing have in mind. On its web site, the Media Lab claims to pursue "a future where the bits of the digital realm interact seamlessly with the atoms of our physical world, and where our machines not only respond to our commands, but also understand our emotions—a future where digital innovation becomes the domain of all."
I suppose Bill Gates' networked house is the reigning emblem of ubiquitous computing. When the door knows who is entering the room and communicates this information to the multimedia system, the background music and the images on the walls can be adjusted to suit the visitor's tastes. When the car and garage talk to each other, the garage door can open automatically whenever the car approaches.
Once your mind gets to playing with such scenarios—and there are plenty of people of good will in academic and industrial organizations who are playing very seriously with them—the unlimited possibilities crowd in upon you, spawning visions of a future where all things stand ready to serve our omnipotence. Refrigerators that tell the grocery shopper what is in short supply, shopping carts that communicate with products on the shelves, toilets that assay their clients' health, clothes that network us, kitchen shelves that make omelets, smart cards that record all our medical data, cars that know where they're going—clearly we can proceed down this road as far and fast as we wish.
And why shouldn't we move quickly? Why shouldn't we welcome innovation and technical progress without hesitation? I have done enough computer programming to recognize the inwardly compelling force of the knowledge that I can give myself crisp new capabilities. It is hard to prefer not having a particular capability, whatever it might be, over having it.
Moreover, I'm convinced that to say we should not have technical capability X is a dead-end argument. It's the kind of argument that makes the proponents of ubiquitous computing conclude, with some justification, that you are simply against progress. You can only finally assess a tool in its context of use, so that to pronounce the tool intrinsically undesirable would require an assessment of every currently possible or conceivable context. You just can't do it—and if you try, you underestimate the fertile, unpredictable winds of human creativity.
But this cuts both ways. You also cannot pronounce a tool desirable (or worth the investment of substantial resources) apart from a context of desirability. Things are desirable only insofar as a matrix of needs, capacities, yearnings, practical constraints, and wise judgment confirms them.
The healthy way to proceed would be to concern ourselves with this or that activity in its fullest context—and then, in the midst of the activity, ask ourselves how its meaning might be deepened, its purpose more satisfyingly fulfilled. Only in that meditation can we begin to sense which technologies might be introduced in appropriate ways and which would be harmful. If you want to know how to make food preparation in the kitchen a more satisfying experience, then find the most deeply committed gardeners and cooks you can and apprentice yourself to them.
But it's difficult to overestimate the appeal of purely technical challenges—or the hard work required to integrate a technical achievement into a fully human context. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the way we like to speak of "solutions."