Marc Andreessen Describes Vision of 'Ambient Computing' (telegraph.co.uk) 106
An anonymous reader writes: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is one of the biggest investors in technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, he spoke about how he envisions the future of computing. It's essentially an extension on the idea of the "Internet of Things." He thinks mobile phones will begin to be replaced in just 10 years. "The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting. By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project." Within 20 years, he expects most new physical objects to have some sort of chip implanted within them. "The end state is fairly obvious — every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet." The term for this is "ambient computing." There will obviously be a transition period — perhaps the so-called internet of things is just an early phase of that transition. But with powerful chips and sensors becoming incredibly cheap, Andreessen's scenario seems possible. I guess it's time to get cracking on those security and privacy concerns.
Let me be the first to say ... (Score:1)
Bullshit!
Re:Let me be the first to say ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Internet of Things" will be nothing but a gigantic clusterfuck, due to the fact that nobody gives two shits about security.
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They need to clear some things like IPv6 before "Internet of Things" can work...
Marc Andreessen over-estimates his mental ability. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Ah, good old Nutscrape Nervergetthere.
Fucking piece of goddam shit. Mind, you, so was Inthenads Exploder at the time.
I remember when some sites would work on one and no the other, what a PITA.
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And all of you running MA down have overseen the creation of much better, even world class, browser engines and finished browsers no doubt?
Really, whether you agree with MA or not, argue about the ideas, not the person. Didn't anybody, anywhere, anytime (mom, dad, teacher, mentor. professor?) ever teach you how to have a DISCUSSION? The focus of the discussion is on the ideas, not on the person. So let's reboot and try this again.
Shit! you just don't get it do you? Andressen, and what became of Netscape, ar
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It's like seeing a sports star who was great back in the day, or an artist who did one good album.
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It will be like cars. At first no one cares about safety, until things start going badly wrong and they are forced to care.
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Bullshit!
So, I'm guessing from that statement, that you have the intention of connecting your butt to the Internet of Things. Who knows, it might be a big hit, and your butt will be the next Facebook . . . ?
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It is BS because there is no reason to connect a doorknob to the Internet. Once a door is smart enough, it can open itself, and there won't be a doorknob. I was once with a friend who missed his bus. He said he wished he had a Star Trek transporter ... so he could beam himself to the next bus stop. Wishing for a "smart doorknob" is the same sort of small minded thinking.
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I was once with a friend who missed his bus. He said he wished he had a Star Trek transporter ... so he could beam himself to the next bus stop.
Darn it Bill. Well done indeed. My hero Yogi Berra would have loved it!
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Heh... I had a friend come up and visit last spring and I took him over to a small town where I'd bought a piece of property. I was showing him where some famous people had lived and talking about the town's history, pretty much how everything had passed by and there was little left but memories. We walked by a graveyard and he turned to me and asked, "So, who's dead in there?"
I replied, "Everybody."
At any rate, if you ever get the chance to visit Maine - you might like it. You'd probably fit right in. They
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They'll find a reason to justify it. They wanted to push RFID tags onto everyone, so the idea was to have the refrigerator and freezer internet ready. Then they could tell you how much time each food item had before it expired it's sell by date. An internet-ready toaster could bake messages onto your bread.
Maybe doorknobs would use fingerprint recognition so that doors could only be opened or closed by chosen people at chosen times.
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Maybe doorknobs would use fingerprint recognition so that doors could only be opened or closed by chosen people at chosen times.
Face recognition would be a better way to achieve that. Fingerprint recognition won't work if the user is wearing gloves, and you would still have all the old drawbacks of doorknobs, including spreading disease, difficult to open when carrying things, difficult to use if in a wheelchair or using crutches, etc.
Quite... He even contradicts himself. (Score:5, Interesting)
That line edited for the summary (and people say editors don't do anything) actually goes like this:
"The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting.
By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project," he told the Telegraph.
"Hypothetically you walk upto a wall, sit at a table and [talk to] an earpiece or eyeglasses to make a call. The term is ambient or ubiquitous computing."
If tables, walls etc. have screens or projectors - why special earpieces or glasses?
If special glasses are ubiquitous - who needs screens in tables and walls? Wouldn't empty and clean flat surfaces be far more useful then?
And what's the use of a chip in a chair? To tell you that it is occupied or not? Wouldn't a single camera in the room do that and more?
Article further gives examples such as:
Pharmaceutical companies transporting drugs or vaccines need to constantly monitor temperature;
logistics or delivery companies track their fleet of vehicles over long distances;
and perishable food companies need to monitor internal temperature and humidity of trucks to check if their goods are spoiling.
None of that is "Internet of Things" or "ambient or ubiquitous computing" nor would those examples benefit from chips and sensors on every single item that is being transported in those trucks.
Why then all those additional sensors?
Well... cause it would be expensive to make dedicated case by case monitoring systems to replace somewhat manual (but cheap) solutions already employed. As in, there's an employee doing that right now.
So the solution is to cover EVERYTHING with sensors instead.
Thus eliminating the cost of installing sensors and networks by shifting it to every producer of everything in the world.
Who would then shift that cost (and all the unnecessary "features" they'd have to invent for their products) - to the customers.
While "the cloud" will pick up the rest.
Thus, "reducing the costs" of creating "ubiquitous computing" to software only - i.e. nothing, as developers are already being paid anyway, or they'll just do it for fun and experience.
That's the logic.
"The problem is that manual measurements are very common in hospitals, pharmaceutical delivery chains, and even the distribution of dairy and meat produce.
Someone actually goes to the warehouse to fill out a report with pen and paper every 3 hours," says Samsara's CEO Sanjit Biswas, whose previous network technology startup Meraki sold to Cisco for over $2 billion.
His big idea: installing cheap sensors, and uploading and analysing data to the cloud makes Samara 1/10th of the cost of existing industrial sensors (complex systems made by huge incumbents like Intel), and deployable in under 10 minutes.
"If you want a tailored system, someone like IBM will build you a custom solution but it usually costs $5m so it doesn't make sense unless you're a large company," he explains.
Andreessen is a fierce believer in the impact of this wave of software-driven sensor startups.
His core thesis is that over the next 20 years every physical item will have a chip implanted in it.
"The end state is fairly obvious - every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet.
Just like with the web itself, there will be thousands of of use cases - energy efficiency, food safety, major problems that aren't as obvious as smartwatches and wearables," he says.
Except that is not "software-driven sensors" but "sensor-driven software".
Which relies on someone first providing ubiquitous sensors in every doorknob - which could then be used for "major problems that aren't as obvious".
I.e. It's a solution we don't really have a problem for quite yet. But it would be great if someone else paid for it.
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I may be able to answer some of your questions:
If tables, walls etc. have screens or projectors - why special earpieces or glasses?
It could be lack of vision on Mr. Andreessen's part. Or possibly better sound quality, or so it can more easily identify the speaker. But really he is just speculating, so maybe it will be screens, or maybe it will be glasses. He doesn't know, he is just trying to get people to imagine it and think about it.
If special glasses are ubiquitous - who needs screens in tables and walls? Wouldn't empty and clean flat surfaces be far more useful then?
The glasses may
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The glasses may have limited resolutions, bandwidth, or battery life. A screen on the table might be better for children, or for collaboration. Yes, in theory the special glasses could display the same thing to each person, in the same way that 5 people could sit together and watch a movie on their phones, but that may be awkward or inefficient.
Do you really believe it is a good idea to consume energy for devices that have no real purpose? How efficient it is to waste energy on a myriad of useless devices? Once people will have to pay the energy bill, let me tell you the intelligent doorknob will not come to reality. Do you really think it is more efficient to watch a movie on a table turned into a screen rather than on a TV screen designed for this purposed and hanged to the wall? Andreessen is smoking weed.
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It looks like you have some valid criticism of Mark Andreessen's article. I recommend posting those in reply to the Slashdot posting, rather than my post.
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Special glasses would be useful when going outside away from man-made structrues in the outback. For motorcyclists the display could be built into the visor.
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I'm fact most commercial transport vehicles already have GPS trackers and, for cold storage, temperature sensors built in. They are very cheap already, it's just the backbend system to monitor it all that is custom and somewhat expensive.
These days microcontrollers cost cents and usually have sensors like a thermometer built in. If you open up a random LED desk lamp chances are there is some kind of microcontroller in there, allowing for PWM controlled brightness levels and thermal cut off of the power supp
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"... every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet."
Allow me to be vulgar and say, "Like fuck it will." There is absolutely zero chance of that happening - and I'm kind of a computer loving geek. I have 0 IoT type devices that actually do the whole "internet" part of that - unless you want to count cameras and, even then, I have to login to a local system, as I am not home, and then (and only then) is that very specific IP address allowed to view those camera feeds.
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Yes, but what if you could control your Nintendo with Play-Doh? Or make a piano from bananas?
http://www.makeymakey.com/
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Are people getting killed for hacking yet, outside of specific national security and military targets?
I could almost see a bank or large financial institution employing some kind of private security contractor to clip especially obnoxious overseas hackers who aren't easily accessible to the normal law enforcement channels.
On the other hand, IDing specific culprits and actually tracking them down might be tough and the more serious ones usually have substantive local allegiances that could make them difficul
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I probably have more crap in my house than you, yet there are plenty of people who know where my key is and know the alarm code. The alarm, if set off, would mean the cops get there in an hour or so - at best. What I do have is insurance. If my house gets broken into then I'm going to want to know why because they could have just asked me. Depending on who, how, and why - I might not even want to have them sent to jail. You want them put away for life, over property?
I don't want to live in your future.
Re: Marc who...? (Score:1)
Thank you. Nothing he said wasn't ridiculously obvious, even 10-20 years ago.
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props on the catastrophic misspelling
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So does the television and computer, but you got those anyways.
Hey kids, let me tell you a story... (Score:5, Interesting)
We call it "Biology". And, in my professional capacity as a fungus, let me remind you that you'd be fucking insane to want your computers to go down that path.
It's impressive that machines made of meat work at all; but that doesn't change the fact that they are tottering heaps of uncontrolled complexity, riddled with pathogens and parasites, kept alive only because they are (sometimes) more fault-tolerant than they are faulty; and because the various microorganism militias are too busy fighting assorted cryptic metabolic battles and it is possible to enter alliances of convenience with some of them, if you get lucky.
People have done a terrible enough job keeping a bunch of loosely-linked deterministic finite state machines from descending into a putrid jungle of malware that inspires comparison to unpleasant biological outcomes. You want to add more; and link them more tightly? Have fun with that.
Re:Hey kids, let me tell you a story... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is already a domain where ubiquitous integration of high complexity capabilities into virtually all materials with room for them is a reality.
We call it "Biology". And, in my professional capacity as a fungus, let me remind you that you'd be fucking insane to want your computers to go down that path.
I went from majoring in computer science to studying biology (ecology, cell biology and genetics, just up to stage 3). It was a humbling experience.
Computer scientists and engineers like to feel that what they work with is sophisticated and cool. This stuff is *nothing* on biological systems.
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This scares me (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done.
The more complex a system, the easier it is to disrupt. Last week we lost power one evening for a couple of hours and my young daughter didn't know what to do. She couldn't understand why nothing except her iPad would work. No TV, no computer, no Internet, no music, no texting, no contact with anyone not physically in her presence. But at least she could access the refrigerator and her room.
If, as suggested in the summary, "every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet." then she wouldn't be able open a door or even enter or exit the house without approval from some server. Lack of power or a lack of connectivity would be a serious impediment to simply living in a house. Would all these things be controlled from a house server? Is everyone going to become a sysop? And think what a hacker could do with access to the house server. Or a burglar.
Or am I misunderstanding how this would all work?
Re: This scares me (Score:2, Insightful)
So you're saying your daughter is an idiot?
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As to burglars, it simply changes the skillset required to be successful. A determined thief or gang of thieves will find a way in if they want regar
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That someone is probably a 24-year old MBA or some dipshit from Calcutta whose name actually is "Dipshit".
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I think you misunderstand. For example, my car has automatic headlights that come on when a sensor says that it is dark. There is a manual override in case that sensor fails.
So in your high tech house the lights might switch off when you are not in the room and come on automatically, but you would still have an override switch on the wall.
The real danger is that the lights are too smart and become hackable, and some 4chan loser decides to give you an epileptic fit.
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Physical switches cost money. Once you have some other control mechanism, it's almost inevitable that it'll become the only mechanism.
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Physical switches cost money. Once you have some other control mechanism, it's almost inevitable that it'll become the only mechanism.
This seems unlikely anywhere the idiot hipsters haven't taken over. All of us have those physical switches right now. That's all we have, right now. Only an idiot hipster would remove the physical switch for a "cleaner user interface experience". Then they'll complain about their insomnia when the hidden electronically controlled switch fails. The rest of us will just turn off the damn light.
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They're everywhere.
I have an old archos PMA. It has a d-pad, a pause/go/enter key, a back/close key and a menu key. And the interface just fucking works.
Most things these days do retain one physical switch - for on and off. But it wouldn't surprise me if that starts disappearing, replaced by some magic gesture or somesuch twatty shit.
Hacker's dream (Score:2)
every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project." Within 20 years, he expects most new physical objects to have some sort of chip implanted within them.
That sounds like a hacker's playground to me.
DEFCON is going to get more and more fun the closer we get to that.
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Television is currently testing rooms 3/4 filled with displays at the walls... see how easily they redecorate the same room between GSN's The Pyramid and The Chase.
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Hmm... They might not be cheaper now. Imagine them all connected to HQ and them just sending the repricing information down the stream to various pre-configured settings. That would almost be trivial at this point - assuming they could keep the devices from being constantly damaged. The expenses that they undergo when they remodel the interior is high enough that such an additional feature might not be more than a trivial rounding error.
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Screens are essential. They create a window into the virtual environment with a bezel around it to prove you're jumping into something not really there.
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Talk about security concerns.
Widget salesman describes ambient widgets (Score:2)
He also says widgets are great, and that despite living in only the 2nd or 3rd generation to be able to have widgets, they are not only essential but should be mixed into soda and consumed with every meal. The road to the future is paved with widgets, upon which we hold numerous patents. So. Buy widgets. Buy them by the truck load. Buy them TODAY!
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All of these devices will have a certain level of personalization
but it will be mostly used to show people ads.
Stupid (Score:2)
This is just stupid. So I don't need a dedicated "single piece of glowing display" in my hand anymore, because I happen to have a doorknob nearby with "some sort of chip implanted within" that is "connected to the internet". So to read a message, I will go touch the doorknob, and then a nearby light begins flashing the message out in morse code? I know that sounds dumb, but that is what he is inferring, right? You don't need a device in your hand because there's just a random assortment of connected stuff
Trademark FOUL! (Score:2)
Ambient is the name of a data service that broadcasts easily-agreed-upon facts like stock quotes and sports scores and stats and weather nowcasts and AccuWeather forecasts. Marc, you need to call this new concept something else.
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Good ideas are often worth repeating. It is neat to know that in 2015 that Mr. Weiser's ideas are still stirring interest, and perhaps closer to reality. It's too bad he didn't live to see this.
This is the next step to Borg (Score:2)
First it was people walking around being obsessed with USENET, discussion forums and flame wars. Then it was their iPhones - continuously textings, facebooking, whatever. I see them on the street all the time, not to mention in restaurants. But now that's not enough. Noooo... We're going to be connected through the Internet of Things - network connected refrigerators, stoves, home furnaces, lamps, medicine cabinets, toilets, table lamps and door knobs. And that's not to mention our self-driving cars
Just look at his motivation. (Score:2)
A mere fragment of the summary tells the important point: ... is one of the biggest investors in technology.
Marc Andreessen
He was once a technologist but he has been a finance puke ever since. As with all of that kind, his primary interest now is in blowing the biggest bubbles he can bet on. Then he will quietly exit by selling to fools before the bubble bursts.
Why will your parent's retirement funds buy into these bubbles near their end of life? Because the same finance pukes tell them too!
Of the many item
I can't wait (Score:2)
Use case (Score:3)
I'm still not seeing a strong use case for having every-thing connected ..
Certainly for things like furniture, just as not all those objects or walls will have need for a display.
It goes back to an old recycling meme .. the "you can extract petroleum, refine it, form it into pellets, form that into a fork, transport it to market where it is bought, transported to place of use and than finally -- used and discarded .. or you can wash the fork and set it aside for reuse".
Meaning in this context, you _could_ have the tables and chairs in a diner report their utilization and/or have a system optimally place customers to enable more people to be served in a given period .. or you can allow the much simpler approach customers use of "sit at an open table".
Not even close (Score:2)
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I'm struck that so many predictions of the future embody two simplistic and misguided assumptions. 1) That the future will progress in a straight line as an extension of the present and 2) that new technology is unquestionably an improvement.
One would think that with the current speed of development we would have developed some degree of immunity to the hypnotic allure of techno-pizzazz for its own sake.
THIS. Unfortunatly, I am all out of mod points, but Mr. AC here speaks the truth. Predictions in the past, that we'd have all diseases cured by 2000, were absolutly ridiculous because they assumed that the rate of drug development would increase linearly. No, we'd just picked the easy fruit, and then it slowed down. For those here who are really old, thry might remember back in the 70's when everybody was told that nuclear power was the way of the future. After all, it was obviously superior to every alter
Courtesy of NSA (Score:1)
What's A Criminal To Do? (Score:2)
Random ramblings (Score:2)
Years ago, with a then-ubiquitous Moto flip phone at my hip, I "invented" what I called the "Urban Commando Phone" - the cell phone already had a clock, why not add things like flashlight, garage door remote, TV Universal Remote, etc. so that instead of having dozens of devices, you had one to "rule them all".
I had no idea, at the time, of the types of convergence that would come in the form of the smart phone, which has all of these and many more either available built in
or easily available.
The term "ubiqu
Ambient Computing is Utter Rubbish (Score:2)
My doorknobs, actually they are more like lever, are perfectly fine. They do not need to be computerized. I do not need a screen in my tables. At the work place there are too many things placed on them. And at home. The table is for eating. If there would be a screen in it, like in my tablet, then it would have to be cleaned intensively after every meal. And when I am eating, I am eating. I do not need to surf the net. And if I want to, I could still use my phone or tablet or notebook. I also do not need a
PARC did it a LOOOONG time ago (Score:3)
Although, they called it "ubiquitous computing". There were connected white-boards and sticky notes all over PARC when I visited there back in the 1980s. Anywhere a few people could have a hallway meeting, in the conference areas, and work spaces, scribbled ideas could be worked out saved and distributed, and recalled, as needed. Took a fair amount of back-end horsepower, but that was before a 64-bit computer fit on your wrist.
It had definite value to a creative group, as they had then, but in most workspaces or residences, it would just be distributing drivel and be a security nightmare.
This is a very limited 1980's vision (Score:1)