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Thesis 28

Everyware is strongly implied by the need of business for continued growth and new markets beyond the PC.

That Motorola executive recently interviewed by The Economist spoke the truth after all: there really is a need to educate consumers about "the value of a connected home and lifestyle"...to Motorola. (Not to single Motorola out, of course.)

Whether or not any one of us has asked to live in such a home, or would ever dream of pursuing such a "lifestyle," there are hard-nosed business reasons why everyware looks like a safe bet. Entire sectors of the economy are already looking to the informatic colonization of everyday things, and not merely as part of an enhanced value proposition offered the purchaser of such things. For manufacturers and vendors, the necessary gear represents quite a substantial revenue stream in its own right.

The logic of success in late capitalism is, of course, continuous growth. The trouble is that the major entertainment conglomerates and consumerelectronics manufacturers have hit something of a wall these last few years; with a few exceptions (the iPod comes to mind), we're not buying as much of their product as we used to, let alone ever more of it. Whether gaming systems, personal video recorders (PvRs), or video-enabled mobile phones, nothing has yet matched the must-have appeal of the PC, let alone reached anything like television's level of market penetration.

Putting with maximum bluntness an aspect of the ubiquitous computing scenario that is rarely attended to as closely as it ought to be: somebody has to make and sell all of the sensors and tags and chipsets and routers that together make up the everyware milieu, as well as the clothing, devices, and other artifacts incorporating them. One rather optimistic analyst sees the market for "digital home" componentry alone growing to $1 trillion worldwide by the end of the decade (yes, trillion, with a tr), and that doesn't include any of the other categories of ubiquitous information-processing gear we've discussed.

So if businesses from Samsung to Intel to Philips to Sony have any say in the matter, they'll do whatever they can to facilitate the advent of truly ubiquitous computing, including funding think tanks, skunk works, academic journals, and conferences devoted to it, and otherwise heavily subsidizing basic research in the field. If anything, as far as the technology and consumer-electronics industries are concerned, always-on, real-time any- and everyware can't get here fast enough.

Thesis 29

Everyware is strongly implied by the needs of an aging population in the developed world.

At the moment, those of us who live in societies of the global North are facing one of the more unusual demographic transitions ever recorded. As early childhood immunization has become near-universal over the last half-century, access to the basics of nutrition and healthcare have also become more widespread. Meanwhile, survival rates for both trauma and chronic conditions like heart disease and cancer have improved markedly, yielding to the application of medical techniques transformed, over the same stretch of time, by everything from the lessons of combat surgery, to genomics, to materials spun off from the space program, to the Internet itself.

It really is an age of everyday wonders. One reasonably foreseeable consequence of their application is a population with a notably high percentage of members over the age of sixty-five. With continued good fortune, many of them will find themselves probing the limit of human longevity, which currently seem to stand pretty much where it has for decades: somewhere around the age of 115.*

* Curiously enough, after a demographic bottleneck, it is the percentage of the "oldest old" that is rising most markedly. Apparently, if you can somehow manage to survive to eighty-five, your odds of enjoying an additional ten or even twenty years are sharply improved.

At the same time, though, with fertility rates plummeting