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The lack of design documentation, the absence of widely agreed-upon standards, the yawning gaps in deployed network infrastructure, and above all the inordinate complexity of many of the challenges involved in everyware certainly suggest that its deployment is in some sense a problem for the longer term. Perhaps we're reading too much into the appearance of a few disarticulated systems; it's possible that the touchless payment systems and tagged cats and self-describing lampposts are not, after all, part of some overarching paradigm.

If, on the other hand, you do see these technologies as implying something altogether larger, then maybe we ought to begin developing a coherent response. It is my sense that if its pieces are all in place—even if only in principle—then the time is apt for us to begin articulating some baseline standards for the ethical and responsible development of user-facing provisions in everyware.

We should do so, in other words, before our lives are blanketed with the poorly imagined interfaces, infuriating loops of illogic, and insults to our autonomy that have characterized entirely too much human-machine interaction to date. Especially with genuinely ubiquitous systems like PayPass and Octopus starting to appear, there's a certain urgency to all this.

As it turns out, after some years of seeing his conception of ubicomp garbled—first by "naively optimistic" engineers, and then by "overblown and distorted" depictions of its dangers in the general-interest media—Mark Weiser had given some thought to this. In a 1995 article called "The Technologist's Responsibilities and Social Change," he enumerated two principles for inventors of "socially dangerous technology":

Build it as safe as you can, and build into it all the safeguards to personal values that you can imagine.

Tell the world at large that you are doing something dangerous.

In a sense, that's the project of this book, distilled into 32 words.

What Weiser did not speak to on this occasion—and he was heading into the final years of his life, so we will never know just how he would have answered the question—was the issue of timing. When is it appropriate to "tell the world at large"? How long should interested parties wait before pointing out that not all of the "appropriate safeguards" have been built into the ubiquitous systems we're already being offered?

My guess, in both cases, is that Weiser's response would be the earliest possible moment, when there's still at least the possibility of making a difference. Even if everyware does take the next hundred years to emerge in all its fullness, the time to assert our prerogatives regarding its evolution is now.

Thesis 69

It is ethically incumbent on the designers of ubiquitous systems and environments to afford the human user some protection.

We owe to the poet Delmore Schwartz the observation that "in dreams begin responsibilities." These words were never truer than they are in the context of everyware.

Those of us who have participated in this conversation for the last several years have dreamed a world of limitless interconnection, where any given fact or circumstance can be associated with an immensely large number of others. And despite what we can see of the drawbacks and even dangers implied, we have chosen to build the dream.

If the only people affected by this decision were those making it, that would be one thing. Then it wouldn't really matter what kind of everyware we chose to build for ourselves, any more than I'm affected right now by Steve Mann's cyborg life, or by the existence of someone who's wired every light and speaker in their home to a wood-grained controller they leave on the nightstand. However strange or tacky or pointless such gestures might seem, they harm no one. They're ultimately a matter of individual taste on the part of the person making them and therefore off-limits to regulation in a free society.

But that's not, at all, what is at stake here, is it? By involving other people by the hundreds