When Things Start to Think - Hardcover

Gershenfeld, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805058745 ISBN 13: 9780805058741

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1999

Synopsis

This is a book for people who want to know what the future is going to look like and for people who want to know how to create the future. Gershenfeld offers a glimpse at the brave new post-computerized world, where microchips work for us instead of against us. He argues that we waste the potential of the microchip when we confine it to a box on our desk: the real electronic revolution will come when computers have all but disappeared into the walls around us. Imagine a digital book that looks like a traditional book printed on paper and is pleasant to read in bed but has all the mutability of a screen display. How about a personal fabricator that can organize digitized atoms into anything you want, or a musical keyboard that can be woven into a denim jacket? Gershenfeld tells the story of his Things that Think group at MIT's Media Lab, the group of innovative scientists and researchers dedicated to integrating digital technology into the fabric of our lives.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Gershenfeld, Ph.D., is an associate professor at MIT, the director of the Media Lab's Physics and Media Group, and codirector of the Things that Think consortium. Gershenfeld has written for Wired and for other technology publications, and he lives in Boston.

Reviews

At MIT's Media Lab, the researchers and students already live in the future. Gershenfeld, director of the Physics and Media Group and co-director of the Things That Think consortium at the Media Lab, offers a user-friendly tour of that present future. There, "smart paper" is recycled by your printer and the coffee pot recognizes your cup and serves up your preference. Gershenfeld's sympathies are with those who feel they are the servants of computers rather than the other way around. His answer to a recent report of a man who shot his crashed PC (four times in the hard drive and once in the monitor) is to give computers the ability to sense and respond to their environments. At a recent fashion show, he reports, MIT grad students modeled jackets outfitted with very personal computers that are powered by natural movement and can play music, or change the appearance of the fabric from solid to pinstripe. So why do the rest of us have to settle for staring at the screens of our blind, dumb and deaf PCs? Gershenfeld makes a strong case that compartmentalization and secrecy in education, research and industry has brought us to an impasse that can be overcome only by creative chaos and openness. Especially for techno-phobes, Gershenfeld's easy style and light use of technical terms makes his book a fun and tantalizing glimpse into the world to come. Illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An Associated Press report from Issaquah, Wash., in 1997 told of a man who pulled a gun and shot his personal computer several times. The police took him off for mental evaluation. According to Gershenfeld, "they should have instead checked the computer for irrational and antisocial behavior." Which is to say that Gershenfeld, director of the physics and media group and co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is yet another computer wizard who thinks that computers and other high- technology devices are too hard to use. "There is a disconnect," he says, "between the breathless pronouncements of cybergurus and the experience of ordinary people left perpetually upgrading hardware to meet the demands of new software, or wondering where their files have gone, or trying to understand why they can't connect to the network. The [digital] revolution so far has been for the computers, not the people." That said, Gershenfeld goes on to describe a number of ways in which devices might be designed to anticipate the user's needs and operate almost invisibly from the user's viewpoint. Taking health care as an example, he envisions what Things That Think might do. "In a TTT world, the medicine cabinet could monitor the medicine consumption, the toilet could perform routine chemical analyses, both could be connected to the doctor to report aberrations, and to the pharmacy to order refills, delivered by FedEx (along with the milk ordered by the refrigerator and the washing machine's request for more soap)."

This book is the result of Gershenfelds years of research as director of the Physics and Media Group at MIT's famous Media Labit lets us peek at the remarkable new digitized world he foresees. He thinks our digital world is immature and cumbersome . Personal computers are already as outmoded as typewriters; even the Internet and Worldwide Web are just emerging from their juvenile phase. The present Digital Revolution features machines that merely entertain and dazzle when what we need is a digital world accessible to everyone and interactive on all occasions. Although some of Gershenfeld's projectssuch as a ``personal fabricator'' that works with digitized atoms, an electronic cello, or moveable and wearable computersmay seem exotic, all aim at enh ancing ordinary people's lives. Future digital books, for example, will be interactive, containing the best of traditional and digital worlds. ``Smart money will be able to be personalized and spent in many ways. Digitized educational opportunities will m ake many present teaching and learning practices obsolete. We must outgrow our two-dimensional digital world, Gershenfeld exhorts, and enter the multidimensional digitized world of sounds, sights, and even touch. The fact that a desktop needs a desk and a laptop needs a lap, he says, shows we are in the formative stages. New interface paradigms will allow children and adults to create, innovate, learn, and teach. But, he claims, the digital world must be in harmony with the natural world, and we can learn from biological models. Gershenfelds vision of a digitized future is a humanistic one, finally: the cyberworld should enhance the real world, not replace it, and should empower people, not machines, to solve problems. This can be done only in collaborati on with digital researchers, academics, and the scientific community, but input must also come from common folks. Gershenfeld continually advances the cutting edge of the Digital Revolution, while striving to humanize it. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Director of the Physics and Media Group and codirector of the Things That Think consortium, both at MIT's Media Lab, Gershenfeld has all sorts of provocative projects, including a book with electronic ink that can be reconfigured by microchip to display any book you want (see Inside Track, "Making Book(s)," LJ 5/15/98, p. 72).
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805058745
• ISBN 13: 9780805058741
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225