THE INTELLIGENT ENVIRONMENT
According to Hald, “Home computers can already talk, interpret speech, and control appliances. Throw in a few sen-sors, a modest vocabulary, the Bell Telephone system ;nul your house could talk to … anyone or anything in tin-world.” Many obstacles still lie ahead, but the direction ol change is clear.
“Imagine,” Hald writes. “You’re at work, the phone rings. It’s Fred, your house. While monitoring the morning news n ports for stories of recent burglaries, Fred picked up a weather bulletin warning of pending heavy rain. This jogged Fred’s bubble memories to run a routine roof maintenance check. A potential leak was found. Before calling you, Fred phoned Slim for advice. Slim is a ranchstyle home down the block. . . Fred and Slim often shared data banks and each knew they were programmed with an effective search technique for identifying household services…….. You’ve learned to trust Fred’s judgment, andapprove the repairs. The rest is rather straight forward, Fred calls the roofer. “
The fantasy is funny. Yet it spookily catches the feel of life in an intelligent environment. Living in such an environment raises chilling philosophical questions. Will machines take over? Can intelligent machines, especially as they are linked together in mtercommunicating networks, outrun our ability to understand and control them? Will Big Brother some day be able to tap not merely our telephones but our toasters and television sets, keeping tabs on our every move and mood? How dependent should we allow ourselves to become on the computer and the chip? As we pump more and more intelligence into the material environment, won’t our own minds atrophy? And what happens if someone or something pulls the plug out of the wall? Will we still have the basic skills needed for survival?
For each question there are innumerable counterquestions. Can Big Brother really keep tabs on every toaster and TV set, every car engine and kitchen appliance? When intelligence is distributed widely throughout the entire environment, when it can be activated by users in a thousand places at once, when computer users can communicate with one another without going through the central computer (as they do in many distributed networks), can Big Brother still control things? Rather than enhancing the power of the tota1it:ni:m state, the decentralization of intelligence may, in fact, w it. Alternatively, won’t we be smart enough to outfox govern ment? In The Shockwave Rider, a brilliant, complex novel l>y John Brunner, the central character successfully .sahoinj-es tln-efforts of the government to impose thought control iln«>nrl<
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