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Take voice-recognition interfaces, for example. Any such system, no matter how sophisticated, will inscribe notions of a nominal voice profile that a speaker must match in order for his or her utterances to be recognized. Spoken commands made around a mouthful of coffee—or with a strong accent—may not be understood. It may turn out that ubiquitous voice recognition has more power to enforce crisp enunciation than any locution teacher ever dreamed of wielding.

This is problematic in two ways. First, of course, is the pragmatic concern that it forces users to focus on tool and not task, and thus violates every principle of an encalming pervasive technology. But more seriously, we probably weren't looking to our household management system for speech lessons. Why should we mold something as intimate, and as constitutive of personality, as the way we speak around some normative profile encoded into the systems around us?

There are still more insidious ways in which we can feel pressured to conform to technically-derived models of behavior. Some of the most unsettling are presented by biometric monitors such as BodyMedia's SenseWear patch.

BodyMedia's aim, as a corporate tagline suggests, is to "collect, process, and present" biometric information, with the strong implication that the information can and will be acted upon. This is, no doubt, a potential boon to millions of the sick, the infirm and the "worried well." But it's also a notion with other reverberations in a society that, at least for the moment, seems hell-bent on holding its members to ever-stricter ideals of form and fitness. For many of us, a product that retrieves biometric data painlessly, coupled to sophisticated visualization software that makes such data not merely visible but readily actionable, is going to be irresistible.

Notice how readily the conversation tends to drift onto technical grounds, though. Simply as a consequence of having the necessary tools available, we've begun to recast the body as a source of data rather than the seat of identity (let alone the soul). The problems therefore become ones of ensuring capture fidelity or interpreting the result, and not, say, how it feels to know that your blood pressure spikes whenever your spouse gets home from work. We forget to ask ourselves whether we feel OK about the way we look; we learn to override the wisdom and perspective that might counsel us that the danger posed by an occasional bacchanal is insignificant. We only notice how far our blood glucose levels have departed from the normative curve over the last 48 hours.

This is not to park such issues at BodyMedia's door alone. The same concerns could of course be raised about all of the systems increasingly deployed throughout our lives. The more deeply these systems infiltrate the decisions we make every day, the more they appear to call on all the powers of insight and inference implied by a relational technology, the less we may come to trust the evidence of our own senses.

Thesis 44

In the event of a default, fixing a locus of control may be effectively impossible.

Largely as a consequence of their complex and densely interwoven nature, in the event of a breakdown in ubiquitous systems, it may not be possible to figure out where something's gone wrong. Even expert technicians may find themselves unable to determine which component or subsystem is responsible for the default.

Let's consider the example of a "smart" household-management system, to which all of the local heating, lighting, ventilation, and plumbing infrastructure has been coupled. In the hope of striking a balance between comfort and economy, you've set its winter mode to lower any room's temperature to 60 degrees Fahrenheit when that room has been empty for ten minutes or more, but to maintain it at 68 otherwise.

When the heat fails to come on in one room or another, which of the interlinked systems involved has broken down? Is it a purely mechanical problem with the heater itself, the kind