- We have never before lived in a world where
your telephone knows your name, social networks hitch rides on
objects and places, doorknobs decide who gets into a room and
know who has entered, and every place you go, every thing you
touch, is more likely than not to contain a processor and a
miniature radio.
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- "RFID" isn't a household word yet, but geeks
are beginning to care about "Radio Frequency ID tags" because of
the privacy implications. The cost and size of microprocessor
technology had dropped to the point where a sensor, a computer,
and a radio transponder can be woven into clothing or embedded
in the packaging of consume packaged goods. The notion that your
razor blades might be spying on you is scary, but privacy isn't
all there is to it. RFIDs are only the beginning, just as the
first microchip, suitable only for desk calculators, was only
the beginning for chips and PCs in the 1970s. Think about what
it will feel like to inhabit a world where every object we
handle, consume, or wear is likely to contain computing gizmos.
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- All these chips have the power to store
information and to transmit it wirelessly to a nearby reader.
Many chips available today have the power to sense the
environment - tracking microwaves, movements, temperature, trace
amounts of certain chemicals or biological organisms, the
electronic identities of cell phones that pass by, the level of
flow in the sewage and subway lines for a city, the presence of
people in buildings and rooms. Many of them are equipped to
self-organize ad-hoc networks with other sensors, processors,
and human-usable devices like telephones. Gillette ordered 500
million RFID tags in 2003. Over the next year and a half, the
first billion RFID tags will start circulating. After that,
we'll be looking at the possibility of trillions of tags.
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- Lately, I've been poking around places where
different kinds of enterprises play with RFID chips. In April, I
visited the Rem Koolhaas-designed Prada showcase store in
Manhattan, where ubiquitous screens turn every garment into a
multimedia show: hang a few items on the rack in the dressing
room, and a window on a display screen opens for each garment;
touch the screen to watch runway models in the clothing, view
shoes and other garments that could go with your selection. I
also visited Procter and Gamble's unmarked information
technology laboratory on the outskirts of Cincinnati, where
Walmart and other P&G customers can walk through the aisles of a
store of the near future, where every case of detergent is
tracked from factory to checkout.
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- Fashion and consumer packaged products are
today's first beachheads, but don't encompass the entire
eventual domain of RFID tags. Wired reported in April, 2003 that
"researchers at the University of Rochester began a clinical
study of bacteria-sniffing microchip probes. Eventually, they
hope to embed a handful of the devices into a single bandage,
which would be able to detect specfic pathogens like salmonella,
listeria, and E. coli. When a probe detects a bug, a small
wireless transmitter on top of the dressing will notify an
ambulance's onboard computer."
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- General Tommy Franks required all DOD
containers shipped to Iraq to include RFID Tags, allowing "pull"
logistics, rather then "push." After Benetton announced plans to
embed RFID tags into 15 million of their clothing tags, the
organization "Privacy Advocates" called for a boycott. Little
more than two weeks later, after a storm of privacy-related
consumer criticism, Benetton announced a radically scaled-back
deployment.
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- As part of a new, federally mandated
tracking system, the three major U.S. automobile manufacturers
plan to put RFID tags in every tire sold in the nation. The tags
can be read on vehicles going as fast as 160 kilometers per hour
from a distance of 4.5 meters. Imagine the worldview of the
generation born into a computation-pervaded world. Using
experimental methods that have been developed to study the ways
people react to one another, Stanford researchers Byron Reeves
and Clifford Nass substituted automatic devices such as
computers, or even representations of people such as video
images, for one of the parties in classic two-person social
psychology experiments. They found that although people claim
that they know the difference between humans and machines, their
cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to artificial
representations of humans are identical to the reactions they
have to real people. Humans evolved to pay close attention to
other people, to the way people treat us, to facial expressions
and tone of voice. Our artifacts might be in the information
age, but our biology is still prehistoric
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- As we head into this world where the lines
between things and human intelligence is blurred, work of people
like Reeves and Nash raises a disturbing possibility: the
generations born after 2010 will grow up to think techno-animistically.
"Techno-animism" is a term that Mark Pesce used to describe the
future of computerized toys, and it's a fitting description of
the disturbing psychological implications raised by Reeves and
Nash and others. Among the more predictable effects of rooms or
shirts that call us by name is the probability that people will
project unwarranted intelligence upon things and places that
convey information but actually know nothing.
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- http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100132&threshold=-1
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