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This is an excerpt from the "Proceedings of the Sixth European Assembly on Telework and New Ways of Working - Telework '99" Aarhuss, Denmark, 22-24 September 1999. The entire proceedings are downloadable as a zipped pdf file (3.5 Mb) by clicking here.

Mike Hawley -- Things that think: technical visions for the future

Mike Hawley is Professor of Media Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Boston USA and is a principal investigator of Things That Think, a groundbreaking research programme that explores the limitless ways digital media will infuse everyday objects.

We are living in a world where work and play are blurring. We can call this tele-living if we like. Every individual person has a different IQ and different things to contribute. There is a vast range and reservoir of talent and creativity to tap. Connecting computers to the Internet is the new, exciting and potentially momentous way of unlocking these resources. Today, there are 120 million computers connected to the Internet. In five years time this will be over 1 billion. This is when the real change will come. Amazon.com is (just) the Kitty Hawk of e-commerce. E-bay is another. All this is leading to a more "perfect" economic system, where buyer and seller can meet each other direct.

Physical book stores are nice places to browse and meet and will of course survive. Pharmacies, however, will probably disappear. They are not so congenial and people just want standard drugs which can be ordered over the net and delivered to a location of your choice.

All this is part of a development in which things are becoming aware of each other. Today, nothing you can touch or you are near knows who you are. In the future, everything will know who you are. We will no longer be impersonal consumers. A good example oif this is the Lego product Mindstorms, which is already available. Lego has always been, not just about putting bricks together, but about putting stories together. Mindstorms adds a new dimension. This toy is a tool, a spark plug for the mind, to create dreams and new stories.

This is counter intelligence, where everybody's and everything's intelligence are connected together, not just uni-directionally as is normally the case at present but in every possible counter direction as well. When things can talk to things can talk to people, a large number of new possibilities opens up. For example, people are always happiest when something is entering or leaving their bodies, such as food! There are immense opportunities with kitchen appliances, with recipes, with the ingredients themselves, for them to talk to each other and with us. Shoes and clothing are another example, thus, we will get shoes that can teach you to dance. Our body net will become the inner net as medical and health (let alone beauty) information and intelligence flow between us and the things we wear, consume and use.

Our world is still so disconnected. All this is about to change.