{"product_id":"the-naked-future-isbn-9781591847700","title":"The Naked Future","description":"\u003cb\u003e“A thorough yet thoroughly digestible book on the ubiquity of data gathering and the unraveling of personal privacy.” —Daniel Pink, author of\u003ci\u003e Drive\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThanks to recent advances in technology, prediction models for individual behavior grow more sophisticated by the day. Whether you’ll marry, commit a crime or fall victim to one, or contract a disease are becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick Tucker draws on fascinating stories from health care to urban planning to online dating. He shows how scientists can predict your behavior based on your friends’ Twitter updates, anticipate the weather a year from now, figure out the time of day you’re most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guess how well you’ll do on a test before you take it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTucker knows that the rise of Big Data is not always a good thing. But he also shows how we’ve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.“Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and highly entertaining.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eRay Kurzweil\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eHow to Create a Mind\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003ePatrick Tucker\u003c\/b\u003e is the technology editor of\u003ci\u003e Defense One\u003c\/i\u003e and the former deputy editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Futurist \u003c\/i\u003emagazine. His writing has also appeared in\u003ci\u003e Slate\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTechnology Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Wilson Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Utne Reader\u003c\/i\u003e, among other outlets. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIMAGINE \u003c\/b\u003ewaking up tomorrow to discover your new top-of-the-line smartphone, the device you use to coordinate all your calls and appointments, has sent you a text. It reads:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eToday is Monday and you are probably going to work. So have a great day at work today!—Sincerely, Phone.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWould you be alarmed? Perhaps at first. But there would be no mystery where the data came from. It’s mostly information that you \u003ci\u003eknow\u003c\/i\u003e you’ve given to your phone\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow consider how you would feel if you woke up tomorrow and your new phone predicted a much more seemingly random occurrence:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGood morning! Today, as you leave work, you will run into your old girlfriend Vanessa (you dated her eleven years ago), and she is going to tell you that she is getting married. Do try to act surprised!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat conclusion could you draw from this but that someone has been stalking your Facebook profile and knows you have an old girlfriend named Vanessa? And that this someone has probably been stalking \u003ci\u003eher\u003c\/i\u003e profile as well and spotted her engagement announcement. Now this ghoul has hacked your calendars and your phone!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnsure what to do, let’s say you ignore it for the time being. But then, as you’re leaving work, the prophecy holds true and you pass Vanessa on the sidewalk. Remembering the text from that morning, you congratulate her on the engagement. Her mouth drops and her eyes widen with alarm.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“How did you know I was engaged?” she asks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou’re about to say, “My phone sent me a text,” but you stop yourself just in time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Didn’t you post something to your Facebook profile?” you ask.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Not \u003ci\u003eyet,\u003c\/i\u003e” she answers and walks hurriedly away.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou should have paid attention to your phone and just acted surprised.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis scenario is closer to reality than you might think. In fact, the technology and data already exist to make it happen. We give it away to retailers, phone companies, the government, social networks, and especially our own phones without realizing it. In the next few years that data will become more useful to more people. This is what I call the naked future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe capital-\u003ci\u003eF\u003c\/i\u003e Future was born of the Enlightenment-era notion of progress, the idea that the present—in the form of institutions, products, fashions, tastes, and modes of life—can and must be continually reformed and improved. This is why our interaction with the future as groups and as nations is an expression of both personal and national identity. As a public idea, the future shapes buying, voting, and social behavior. The future is an improved present, safer, more convenient, better managed through the wonders of technology and invention.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the future—in the form of intention—is also an incredibly private idea. Your future, whether it’s what you’re going to do tonight, next year, or the next time you’ve got a thousand bucks to burn, is invisible to everyone but you. We are jealous guards of the personal, secret future, and with good reason. Imagine if any act you were going to commit was laid bare before the world, how naked you would feel.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the next two decades, we will be able to predict huge areas of the future with far greater accuracy than ever before in human history, including events long thought to be beyond the realm of human inference. The rate by which we can extrapolate meaningful patterns from the data of the present is quickening as rapidly as is the spread of the Internet because the two are inexorably linked. The Internet is turning prediction into an equation. Mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, marketers, and hackers are using a global network of sensors, software programs, information collection devices, and apps to reveal in ever-greater detail the effects of our perpetual reform on the world around us. From programs that chart potential flu outbreaks to expensive (yet imperfect) “quant” algorithms that anticipate bursts of stock-market volatility, computer-aided prediction is everywhere.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBig Data Is Dead. Long Live Big Data\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBetween November 2010 and February 2013, the number of queries related to the term “big data” jumped by a factor of twenty-nine. That means that if big data were a country that grew every time someone searched for it on Google, it would be the size of the United Kingdom in 2010 and the size of Australia just three years later. It’s a hot topic, but it’s also a phrase that means something different depending on who is trying to sell you what. A couple of years ago, the term referred to data sets so large that the owners of those sets couldn’t derive any insight from them. Big data was a euphemism for unstructured and unworkable bits of information locked away in servers, or worse, on paper. This quality of bigness made those little values on spreadsheets effectively valueless. No more. Go to any IT conference today and you’ll find rooms full of vendors so eager to work with your big data they will be unable to refrain from shoving flash drives into your pockets. Large companies and the government now work with big data all the time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn February 16, 2012, the phrase “big data” made an evolutionary leap with the publication of a piece by Charles Duhigg in the\u003ci\u003e New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. The article exposed how the retail chain Target used records of millions of transactions (and information from its baby registry) to draw a corollary between the purchase of various common items such as unscented baby lotion and pregnancy. When Target began sending coupons for baby supplies to customers who it had statistically deduced were in a family way, one customer’s father had a fit, demanded an explanation, and realized that a soulless company with a lot of records had discovered something extremely intimate about his daughter before she had had a chance to break the news to him. The story was picked up on \u003ci\u003eThe Colbert Report \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Show\u003c\/i\u003e, and was repeated on blogs and news stories around the world. Big data went from a boring business idea to a menacing force for evil. It was a secret statistical prescient power that enormous institutions used against the rest of us. The\u003ci\u003e Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e newspaper’s 2013 revelations about the scope and power of the NSA to surveil communications among U.S. citizens only added to this narrative. We feel we have arrived at an age in which our devices communicate about us in a language we cannot hear to parties we cannot see. Big data belongs to \u003ci\u003ethem\u003c\/i\u003e, not us. We are its victims.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis view of big data is not entirely incorrect. As you’ll find in this book, companies, emboldened by new capabilities, are eager to use the enormous data sets they’ve amassed to squeeze more money out of their present and future customers. Governments, too, are using big data to do more with less, which is fine—as long as you approve of everything the government does.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the view of big data as a dark force available only to large institutions is limited. Big data will shrink, becoming small enough to fit inside single-push notification on a single user’s phone. Most of what we understand about it represents its past, when it was \u003ci\u003esolely \u003c\/i\u003ea capability that the powerful used to gain leverage over the weak. The future of this resource is incredibly open to consumers, activists, and regular people. But big data is only one piece of a larger trend that’s reshaping life on this planet and exposing the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith very little fanfare, we have left the big data era and have entered the \u003ci\u003etelemetric\u003c\/i\u003e age, derived from the word “telemetry”: “The process or practice of obtaining measurements in one place and relaying them for recording or display to a point at a distance. The transmission of measurements by the apparatus making them.”1 Telemetry is the collection and transfer of data in\u003ci\u003e real time\u003c\/i\u003e, as though sensed. If you’ve ever been in a hospital and had an EKG, ECG, or any sort of monitoring device attached to you, if you’ve ever been able to see your cardiac activity displayed heartbeat for heartbeat with the knowledge that that data stream was also reaching the nurse down the hall, possibly even your doctor on his smartphone, then you’ve experienced telemetry. The reach and power of telemetry is what separates the less predictable world in which we evolved our humanity from the more predictable one in which that humanity will grow and be tested.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTelemetry is what divides the present from the naked future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs sensors, cameras, and microphones constitute one way for computer systems to collect information about their—and our—shared environment, these systems are developing perceptions that far exceed our own. Much of what we do, how we live, how we interact with institutions, organizations, and one another takes place online, is readable telemetrically, and leaves clues about where we’ve been and where we’re going. When you make an appointment and save it to the calendar application on your iPhone, when you leave your house and set a home alarm that dialogues directly with your city’s police department, when you activate your phone’s GPS, when you use your debit-procured Metrocard to access the subway and then use a radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled security tag to enter your office, you’ve created a trail that’s transparent to anyone (or anything) with access to the servers and hard drives on which that data is stored. How big is that trail? Between checking your phone, using GPS, sending e-mail, tweets, and Facebook posts, and especially streaming movies and music, you create 1.8 million megabytes a year. It’s enough to fill nine CD-ROMs every day. The device-ification of modern life in the developed world is the reason why more than 90 percent of all the data that exists was created in just the last three years.2 Most of this is what’s called metadata: bits of information that you create (or your devices make on your behalf) through your digital interactions. Only about 10 percent is ever stored permanently and very little of it affects you directly but all of it says something about you. And it’s growing exponentially. There will be forty-four times as much digital information in 2020 (35 zettabytes) as there was in 2009 (8 zettabytes) according to the research group IDC.3\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe think of each of these actions—the making of an appointment, the purchase of that fare through your subway fare card, the swiping of that RFID-enabled security badge—as separate ones of no real consequence to us, as big data. Think of that data instead as \u003ci\u003esensory data\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eas pinpricks that can be felt or sounds that can be heard\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003elike musical notes. The little actions, transactions, and exchanges of daily life do have a rhythm after all, and correspond to one another in a manner not unlike a melody. If you’re like most people, your life has a certain routine: you leave for work at the same time each day; you shop at the same stores on your lunch hour; you take the same route home. Any tune composed of a repetitious sequence of notes becomes predictable. With sensors, geographic information systems, and geo-location-based apps, more of those notes become audible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou’ve probably never heard this song. In the big data present, it’s distant companies, market, and government forces that pick up the sound of our metadata. But this book isn’t about the present. In the naked future the song is audible to everyone. The devices and digital services that we allow into our lives will make noticeable \u003ci\u003eto us\u003c\/i\u003e how predictable we really are.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe different ways we relate to the future publicly and personally will fundamentally change as a result of the fact that we will be making far more accurate and personal predictions. Huge areas of the future will be exposed. It will truly be a naked future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Future App\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThroughout this book I refer to various hypothetical programs or apps like the one at the start of this introduction. These could be cloud-based programs we access on our smartphones, augmented-reality headsets, Microsoft brain implants (the blue screen of death would be literal in this sense), or any future platform. Although there are several apps such as Osito and Google Now that already use personal data to deliver customized predictions, most of the future-predicting apps in this book are made up. What they represent is the end point where telemetric data combine with processing to present an end user with a snapshot of the future. Though the future apps come from big data, just as we evolved from earlier humans, what they represent is something very different: an individual answer or solution to a unique, personal problem.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePredictability based on an abundance of personal data rises in almost direct inverse proportion to private data’s remaining private. So how do we protect our privacy in the digital age?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn researching this book, I talked to people at Google, Stanford, MIT, Facebook, and Twitter; I hung out with hackers, entrepreneurs, scientists, cops, spies, and a billionaire or two. I was amazed by the promise of the telemetric age. I’m a future junkie. I get excited listening to smart people with world-changing ideas because if I didn’t, I would be a pretty poor science journalist. But when I shared my experiences with friends, family, and colleagues and listened to their point of view, I realized that my reaction was not typical. Where I saw a thrilling and historic transformation in the world’s oldest idea—the future—other people saw only Target, Facebook, Google, and the government using their data to surveil, track, and trick them. They were firmly planted in the big data present, in which it is us against them. They all had the same question: What can you do to prevent all of this from happening?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe threat of creeping techno-totalitarianism is real. But the realization of our worst fears is not the inevitable result of growing computational capability. Just as the costs of using big data have decreased for institutions, those costs will continue to trend downward as systems improve and as consumer services spring up in a field that is currently dominated by business-to-business players. The balance of power will shift—somewhat—in favor of individuals. Your phone may be from Apple; your carrier may be AT\u0026amp;T; your browser may be Google; but your data is yours \u003ci\u003efirst\u003c\/i\u003e because you created it through your actions. Think of it not as a liability but as an asset you can take ownership of and use. In the naked future, your data will help you live much more healthily, realize more of your own goals in less time, avoid inconvenience and danger, and, as detailed in this book, learn about yourself and your own future in a way that no generation in human history ever thought possible. In fact, your data is your best defense against coercive, Target-like marketing and perhaps even against intrusive government practices. Your data is nothing less than a superpower waiting to be harnessed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe still have choices to make. I’ll discuss some of the forms those choices will take. But the worst possible move we as a society can make right now is demand that technological progress reverse itself. This is futile and shortsighted. We may be uncomfortable with the way companies, the NSA, and other groups use and abuse our information but that doesn’t mean we will be producing less data anytime soon. As I mentioned earlier, according to the research group IDC there will be forty-four times as much digital information in 2020 as there was in 2009.4 You have a clear choice: use your data or someone else will.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not a book about a change that is going to happen so much as a change that has already occurred but has yet to be acknowledged or fully felt. This is not a declaration of independence from corporate America, the government, or anything else. It’s the record of our journey to this new place: the naked future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCHAPTER 1\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNamazu the Earth Shaker\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE \u003c\/b\u003edate is April 12, 2011. I’m on a highway in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima, home to a now infamous nuclear power plant that’s in the process of melting down. I’ve just left the city of Ishinomaki where I was covering relief efforts that began following last month’s earthquake and tsunami and I’m now heading back to Tokyo. In the car with me are two Japanese fishermen who speak no English, an Australian fireman named Simon, a British reporter stringing for a newspaper out of the Middle East, and a Japanese relief coordinator. Our route is taking us well within the eighty-kilometer “evacuation zone” that the U.S. government has advised its citizens to stay the hell out of. None of us have any illusions that it’s safe to be here. For this reason, and because we’re behind schedule, we’re driving extremely fast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEveryone on this road is driving fast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSuddenly, a loud, sirenlike noise tears through the car’s interior. Simon pulls his walkie-talkie from his Gore-Tex jacket. A bright red light cries out in distress at rhythmic intervals.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Pull over,” Simon commands. The driver applies the brakes, not exactly slamming them but not gradually depressing them, either, and steers the car to the side of the road. Like a surreal piece of choreographed theater, every other car on the road also slows and banks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA moment later, we feel the ground beneath us rise and fall. This is a 6.0 tremor, large enough that—had we been traveling at our previous speed of more than eighty miles per hour—we likely would have crashed. The fishermen, Simon, the car’s other occupants, and I look around at one another. We share a silent acknowledgment that we have just barely avoided a terrible accident.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI’m alive today thanks in part to Japan’s Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system, a network of more than four thousand seismographic sensor stations.1 These devices detect the low-level initial tremors called primary waves or P-waves that are released by seismic activity. An earthquake’s P-wave telegraphs the size of the secondary wave or S-wave, the tremors that crash cities and bring the fury of the sea to shore. The system computes the signals as input and issues output, the feedback of which takes the form of Simon’s phone going off.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe alert is issued automatically the second that the seismometer detects the signal and transfers it to headquarters.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBecause earthquakes are a frequent occurrence in Japan, the alarm now goes off so often it has almost become background noise. In the moments before the 2011 earthquake hit, television broadcasts across the country were briefly interrupted by a crisp, telephonic ringing. A bright blue box appeared on every television screen showing the eastern coast of Japan and a large red \u003ci\u003eX\u003c\/i\u003e offshore depicting the earthquake’s epicenter. In one of the eerier video clips that emerged from March 11, 2011, members of Japan’s parliament can be seen debating a piece of legislation. Because they’re accustomed to the signals they’re slow to react to the warning at first. When they realize the size of the earthquake, they look nervously to the swinging chandeliers above them. The picture cuts to a flustered anchorman who warns of a possible tsunami off the coast of the prefecture of Miyagi.2\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Japanese have been applying creativity and resourcefulness to earthquake prediction for centuries. Historically, national myth held that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a giant catfish, or\u003ci\u003e namazu\u003c\/i\u003e, called the Earth Shaker. Though the idea seems ridiculous today, the Japanese took it very seriously at various points throughout their history. In 1592 the samurai warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued what is perhaps the strangest building-code edict in history to the men constructing his castle in the Fushimi district of Kyoto: “Be sure to implement all catfish countermeasures.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the later Edo period small catfish were awarded a reputation as earthquake predictors. Strange fish behavior was thought to be an indication that the giant \u003ci\u003enamazu\u003c\/i\u003e was on the prowl for mischief.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eToday, the idea feels fanciful. Several centuries of steady scientific progress have taught us to look for concrete causal relationships in order to understand how one physical entity might influence another. We know that the earth’s tectonic plates are affected neither by subterranean fish, nor the position of the constellation of Cassiopeia, nor the current level of God’s wrath but by physical systems of enormous complexity and limited accessibility. Our understanding of the world through the lens of science suggests that P-waves indicate S-waves, but there exists no physical mechanism by which a catfish could know of an earthquake days in advance. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary proves only that humans have active imaginations, because catfish don’t predict earthquakes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTurns out, they almost do.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of the key triggers of large seismic events is the buildup of pressure between rock formations in the earth’s crust. This pressure also releases electrical activity and will do so days before large quake events. Loose “defect electrons” rise up through porous gaps in the earth’s crust; they ionize when they meet the air. Under the \u003ci\u003eright \u003c\/i\u003ecircumstances, this can cause subtle hydrogen peroxide increases in certain fault lines proximate to bodies of water, making such bodies just a bit toxic to very sensitive marine fauna.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBritish zoologist Rachel Grant observed this phenomenon firsthand when hundreds of toads fled a pond near L’Aquila, Italy, in the days just prior to an enormous 2010 earthquake. As Grant wrote in her paper that was published in the \u003ci\u003eJournal of Zoology\u003c\/i\u003e, “Our study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during and after an earthquake. Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system.”3 \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCatfish, like toads, have extremely sensitive skin. But unlike toads, they can’t abandon a body of water that’s becoming toxic. They can only thrash about or behave strangely, like the Earth Shaker.4\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn his book \u003ci\u003eThe Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t\u003c\/i\u003e, statistician Nate Silver is rather hard on Grant. He suggests, though not explicitly, that she’s reached an insupportable conclusion, as her paper seems to assert that the observed toad behavior is “evidence that they [toads] had predicted the earthquake.” He describes her work as the sort of thing that “exhausts” real seismologists and notes dismissively, “Some of the stuff in academic journals is hard to distinguish from ancient Japanese folklore.”5\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSilver is certainly a talented statistician deserving of the celebrity that’s been awarded him. He’s right to point out that history is littered with failed attempts to predict earthquakes, often by observing strange animal behavior. He’s also right to point out that statistical analysis of previous earthquakes is surely a far more useful signal than is toad behavior, at least for now.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut he’s misstating Grant’s intent. She’s not suggesting that the toad behavior is “evidence that they predicted the earthquake.” Neither the toads of L’Aquila, nor the catfish of Japan, nor even the EEW are actually predicting anything and Rachel Grant knows this perfectly well. These are feats not of prognostication but of detection. Grant and her colleagues acknowledge that testing the hypothesis outside a laboratory setting has thus far been impossible because they still don’t know when and where an earthquake will strike. And neither do the toads. When they’re in a pond with higher hydrogen peroxide levels they become uncomfortable and they leave. They are indifferent to earthquakes, to Nate Silver, and to the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s humans who predict things.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs we attempt to make use of this abundance of telemetric data, we’re going to make errors. One of the statistical traps Silver and other statisticians warn against is overfitting, or applying a specific solution to a general problem. In the case of earthquakes, this could mean watching toads rather than history because toad behavior lends itself to a very specific type of prediction method.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe are about to enter a golden age of overfitting, if such a thing can be said to exist. The sheer volume of data we now generate as individuals and institutions suggests that more people will be able to create more models with data points and observations that offer the false promise of certainty. We will model more and so we will make more errors, but an increase in modeling activity will not diminish the costs or consequences of those errors. Many small mistakes will feel extremely large particularly in the context of international stock and commodities markets. Overfitting also speaks to an impulsivity that’s in our nature. We gravitate toward evidence, data, and facts that support a conclusion we’ve already reached or bolster the argument we’re trying to make. Finally there’s enough data to lend some support to virtually \u003ci\u003eany\u003c\/i\u003e argument, no matter how crazy. To overfit is human.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the fact that electrical activity from pressure increases days before large seismic events is beyond dispute. It’s exactly the sort of predictor that could reliably indicate an approaching disaster if only humanity could devise some cost-effective way to place millions of sensitive electron detectors deep beneath the earth’s surface near fault lines. It’s science fiction. But at one point, so was the idea of a sensor spiderweb that could detect P-waves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe are turning our physical environment into a catfish.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Global Nervous System Emerges\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1988 a scientist at Xerox PARC named Mark D. Weiser put forward a novel vision for the future. Computer hardware, he said, would migrate from deskbound PCs to pads, boards, and “smart” systems that were part of the physical environment. The term Weiser gave this new sensing environment was “ubiquitous computing.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis vision for the future speaks a lot about the man who came up with it. Weiser was not a typical computer hardware genius. Take a look at his informal writings and the accounts of people who knew him and you will not find a man who loved gadgets and code for their own sake but someone motivated by a passion for \u003ci\u003eactual \u003c\/i\u003eexperience, a sensualist, a devotee of skydiving, rock repelling, and lead drummer in a punk band called Severe Tire Damage. Through ubiquitous computing he imagined a future in which humans interacted with computers on an unconscious level, through regular activity; a future in which computers served to remove annoyances and answer questions like “Where are the car keys?” “Can I get a parking place?” and “Is that shirt I saw last week at Macy’s still on the rack?”6 while keeping us connected to what we care about. Computers weren’t supposed to get in our way, or be constantly in our hands, or be connected to our ears through shiny white earplugs, or demand that we answer their every chirp and bell. As they became better they were supposed to become more numerous but also disappear into the background.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA decade after his death, it’s the “ubiquitous” portion of Weiser’s ubiquitous computing vision that’s becoming reality for most of us. The total number of devices connected to the Internet first exceeded the size of the global human population in 2008 or so, according to Cisco, and is growing far faster. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCisco forecasts that there will be 50 billion machine-to-machine devices in existence by 2020, up from 13 billion in 2013. Today, we call ubiquitous computing by another name: the Internet of Things.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor large institutional or corporate consumers of information, the spread of sensors and computer hardware across the physical environment amounts to better inventory tracking and customer targeting, which will help bottom lines. The Internet of Things can be found most immediately in the RFID tags that have made their way onto everything from enormous inventory palettes to the clothing labels that Swiss textile company TexTrace7 sews into American Apparel clothing to track shipments. Most RFID tags that we encounter today are small squares of paper, plastic, or glass containing a microchip and an antenna at a cost of about twenty cents. The microchip holds information about the product (or thing the RFID is connected to). The antenna allows an RFID reader to access data on the chip via a unique radio signal. Unlike a simple printed bar or quick response (QR) code, the RFID tag doesn’t have to be directly under the reader to work. The reader need only be close by. This allows retailers to monitor the inventory in their store in something like real time. Some futurists have suggested that RFID could one day render the checkout station obsolete. In this future, when you saw a product that you wanted you would simply pluck it from the shelf and—so long as you had a user account or were identifiable to that store—walk out the door. The product’s RFID tag would tell the retailer the product had been purchased and your account would be debited. Sound far-fetched? Millions of Americans today \u003ci\u003ebuy\u003c\/i\u003e access to toll roads through the dashboard-mounted RFID tags that are part of the E-ZPass system. The act of purchasing takes the form of a simple deceleration and a brief exchange of data between the RFID tag’s antenna and the tollbooth’s reader. And RFID is just one of the many smart or sensing tags and microchips that are making their way into our physical environment at rapidly decreasing cost.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor patients and graying baby boomers, the Internet of Things is ushering in a revolution in real-time medical care. It is alive inside the chest of Carol Kasyjanski, a woman who in 2009 became the second human being to receive a Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker that allows her heart to dialogue directly with her doctor.8 The first was former\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Current","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303131697381,"sku":"NP9781591847700","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781591847700.jpg?v=1767740623","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-naked-future-isbn-9781591847700","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}