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What I would like to see is something along the lines of the Snell certification for auto-racing and motorcycle helmets—or better yet, the projected ISO standards for environmental safety in nanotechnological engineering. This would be a finding of fitness verified by an independent, transparent, and international licensing body: a guarantee to all concerned that to the degree possible, the ubiquitous system in question had been found to observe all necessary protections of the human user. (Such certifications, of course, would do little to protect us from harmful emergent behavior of interacting systems, but neither would they be without value.)

A mechanism such as this means that we can feel safer in harnessing the power of the market to regulate the development of everyware, because the market will have been provided with accurate and appropriate information. A simple, high-visibility marker lets people make informed decisions: Either this system meets the guidelines as they existed at such-and-such a date, or it does not. The guidelines are of course there to peruse in detail should anyone wish to do so, but it's not necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of what they mean at the time of purchase, download, or installation. Everything a user needs to know is right there in the certification.

If sentiment in support of these ideas attains critical mass, we reach a point past which buy-in becomes lock-in. From that point forward, most of the everyware we encounter will have been designed and engineered with a deep consideration for our needs and prerogatives.

The aim, of course, is to build a world in which we get to enjoy as many of the benefits of everyware as possible while incurring the smallest achievable cost. I think this is doable, but to a greater extent than has usually been the case, it's not going to come easily. If we want all of these things, we'll have to:

educate ourselves as to the nature of the various technologies I have here grouped under the rubric of everyware;

decide which of them we will invite into our lives, and under what circumstances;

demand that the technologies we are offered respect our claims to privacy, self-determination, and the quality of life;

and (hardest of all) consistently act in accordance with our beliefs—at work, at the cash register, and at the polls.

Everyware promises so much more than simply smoothing the hassles we experience in our interactions with computers. It aims to rebuild the relationship between computer and user from the ground up, extend the power of computational awareness to every corner of our lives, and offer us vastly more timely, accurate, and useful knowledge of our surroundings, our communities, and ourselves in so doing. It is, in fact, the best candidate yet to become that "sufficiently advanced" technology Arthur C. Clarke so famously described as being "indistinguishable from magic."

We can have it, if we want it badly enough. But the hour is later than we know, the challenges are many and daunting, and most of us barely have an inkling that there's anything to be concerned about in the advent of the next computing. We have our work cut out for us.

Thesis 81

These principles are necessary but not sufficient: they constitute not an end, but a beginning.

Conclusion

Always Crashing in the Same Car

Each morning, upon waking, I indulge myself in the austerities of Buddhist meditation—Korean Zen Buddhism, to be precise, of the Kwan Um School. I sit, empty my mind to the extent that I am able to, and...breathe.

I've been doing this every day for more than 10 years now, absolutely without fail. I've meditated in apartments, barracks, mountain temples, hotel rooms beyond number, on more than one 747 deep in the trans-Pacific night, and once, particularly memorably, in the canvas-webbed cargo bay of a Chinook helicopter chittering its way into a landing zone. It's become one of the few constants of a willfully nomadic and fluid life.

And it's one of the