Talking to the walls
Mark Burgess
Pulibshed in Usneix ;login: June 2004, Volume 29, Number 3 p
17-22
This talk was first presented as a keynote at Nordu2003 and then again at LISA 2003.
A meeting with Medusa
Throughout time we have talked to walls, in special
rooms and in private spaces, communing with deities and seeking
guidance from spiritual powers. Today something else is happening: our
need for solace and comfort is more readily at hand in technological
form. Our need for connection has become more rooted in the physical
but has also expanded to become an addiction that veils a paradox.
Are we all becoming possessed by distant voices --- and thereby remote
from our surroundings?
Imagine a chilly autumn day in downtown Oslo around 1999. The trams
roll through the centre of town, there are small flakes of snow in the
air and I am heading towards the Ibsen car park together with a
visiting colleague to Oslo University College. (In Norway, we are
careful to honor our important writers by naming parking lots after
them.) The car park (parking lot) lies in the centre of town, on the
vedge of the edge. It's a part of town called Grensen, literally "the
edge", and it is populated by some of Oslo's more fantastic
mythological beasts. In Oslo, as most capital cities, a league of
solvent abusers populates the city centre, staggering around
collecting coins and muttering to themselves in their own private
reality. In this environment, it becomes natural associate anyone
muttering to themselves with some form of chemical escapism.
As we enter the high tech lobby to the car park, I hear a voice
talking frantically to someone, as if face to face. It is a figure in
a black Armani, with expensive attache case, standing next to the pay
machines, stepping back and forth, staring into thin air and facing
the wall. A little wire hangs from his ear, but at the time I don't
understand the significance of it. As he sees us, he seems shocked as
though we have invaded his personal bubble. Right here in the most
public place imaginable. I realize that there is something going on
here that was of the greatest importance to society.
Today we don't think twice about handsfree mobile telephones. As we
walk about people are talking to themselves all the time, usually with
a hand glued to their head. But all this has a deeper meaning -- not
just for us, but for system administration. Let's backtrack a little.
Getting rid of the keyboard...
Soon computers will be everywhere: in the walls, in our domestic
appliances and even in our clothing. Mark Weiser, former chief of
technology at Xerox PARC said, "The most profound technologies are
those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of every
day life until they are indistinguisable from it."
The keyboard is a potent symbol that this has not happened with
computers yet. Computers are both conspicuous and unreliable, but
there are several projects around the world to change this. The smart
home of Hewlett Packard, Microsoft's tablet PCs, embedded Linux and
Windows..etc. Still, given the advances in technology, it is reasonable to
ask when this dream of disappearance might happen.
The promise of a technological future has not yet caught up with
science fiction. Technology for computation, multi-media and
communications has not yet disappeared from view: we cannot yet talk
to our walls in a technological sense. A recent article in the IEEE
computer magazine presented what it called the good news and the bad
news about voice-recognition. The bad news is that Star Trek has
raised our expectations about voice recognition so high that it will
be very hard to live up to them. The good news, on the other hand, is
that we have until the 23rd century to sort it out.
We have had the promise of smart devices for many years, though they
have been surprisingly slow in coming. The smart room that can detect your
presence, switch on the lights and turn up the heating before you
arrive by learning your patterns of behaviour has not yet found
widespread acceptance. The smart toilet that analyzes the colonies of
bacteria that we donate to nature each day and finds out if we are
sick, or need dietary modifications has not yet materialized.
Kitchen computers were supposed to keep running inventories of
supplies, be able to watch out for new recipies on the net, order food
when stocks got low, and so on. The kitchen cooker is supposed to be
connected to your personal manager so that it starts warming up your
dinner on the way home (after all, everyone will be single in the
future, so no one will have a partner to do this for them) -- more on
this later
At the larger scale, smart cities will be able to route traffic
automatically to avoid congestion, regulate resources such as lighting
and heating. Buildings will control and reprocess their waste and be
more resource efficient will regard to regulation of temperature and
humidity. The location of individuals is unlikely to remain a real
secret for much longer -- the devices we carry will position us and
cameras and sensors will recognize us. Cities will be able to share
resources with other neighouring cities, and organize common sharable
resource pools -- an automated city council, order extra buses when
the demand increases. Local and global government will be replaced,
slowly but surely, with automated cooperation and resource scheduling.
Embedded devices will eventually be found everywhere -- and not just
those left by the FBI! In restaurants we will have smart menus that
change to the order of the day, with adaptive pricing and Amazon style
recommendations for your order based on what you ordered recently.
Outside, attentive billboards that look back at you. They can gather
information about sex, age, race, the clothes you wear, height and
weight. Walls could even monitor crimical activity for the
police. Humans will be wearing the devices as they move around within
this circus. The increase in surveillance devices has already been
prolific in the later ten years, espcially in countries like the UK.
What might it mean?
What do these developments mean for those of us involved in the
deployment and running of the technologies? We might expect to see
tens of devices per room -- a fairly complex network of devices linked
probably by a bluetooth type of wireless, broadcast network.
There are management and security implications to living in such a
density of information driven devices. The future of system management
will not be a simple task like installing a package for Windows or
GNU/Linux with some simple defaults, it will be a question of
determining an increasingly complex policy that deal with how to
exchange information with others, give others access to our data and
protect ourselves from theirs. As we move from room to room in the
house, the policy requirements will change. We will not want violent
or explicit material transmitted to the children's den; we will not
want telephone calls routed to the children after bedtime. Will
we be able to cope with all of these constraints?
Today we use the term `trusted environment' quite often to describe a
little island that we have made comfortable. But, when computing
becomes ubiquitous, the boundaries of our island have to break down,
because we cannot sustain the illusion that we are all alone there. We
cannot keep track of the pathways, the possibilities or the
interactions. There are people ballooning onto our island and digging
tunnels to it. Others want to use it as a stepping stone to get to
somewhere else...
If computers are going to be running so-called intelligent software,
then they cannot be isolated. How will they receive updates and
instructions? We don't know exactly what operating systems embedded
devices will use in the future, but they are bound to be complex
adaptible operating systems (it will probably be either Linux or
Windows). If they are networked, it makes sense for them to receive
updates and policy changes via the net. But even after ten years of
developing management protocols for distributed devices, like SNMP, we
are not much closer to finding a way to achieve this that is both
efficient and non-intensive for humans.
Another problem is consistency and standardization. All of the
pervasive devices above will eventually emerge, but not in any
coordinated way. I am convinced that it is completely unrealistic to
expect to be able to `manage' the resulting level of complexity using
control protocols, as we shall see below.
The key to understanding pervasive computing lies very much in
understanding people! We are the ones who will select or reject the
technologies --- by market forces. All we have to do today is to look
around us. According to the dreams after the second world war,
everyone was going to be the proud owner of their own robot and
personal spaceship by the year 2000. But, in reality, we were more
interested in the immediate freemdoms of cars and refrigerators.
Domestic Embedded Networks (DENs) will grow product by product, each
with a different manufacturer using different standards. First it will
be a Japanese or Korean microwave oven with an Internet
connection. Then Microsoft will release the new X box that heats up a
pizza while you're playing you favourite game so that you never have
to remove the goggles and visit the real world. Then Sun will
introduce a Java enabled Open Sandwich toaster that produces more
healthy food, and finally there will be a fight for standardization
and post factum and we will end up with the usual evolutionary gene
pool of technologies that cannot be ignored. It won't be a neatly
standardized set of controllable devices: after all, commerce is just
warfare without politics.
If you are an evolutionist, then a broad technological gene-pool is
good for development. But if you are a system administrator control
freak, or even the owner of one of these devices, then it is usually a
nightmare. If technology is going to disappear, then it has to really
disappear and not merely lurk in the shadows moaning for attention.
All of this makes the problem of trust much harder -- and therefore
the problem of security a radically different one than before.
Eventually, simplicity tends to return as mass extinctions delete most
of the competition and we learn to shift the boundaries of trust, and
our little cold war conspiracies dissolve towards more openness --- if
for no other reason than that it is really hard work distrusting
people all the time. But before a simplicity converges over this, we
shall have to deal with the complexity of it.
And here is a good reason why. Maybe smart rooms, smart walls, smart
toilets are not what we want. What about smart people?
Mobility and social behaviour
Steve Mann calls the smart room a "retrograde concept that empowers
structure over the individual, imbuing our houses and public spaces
with the right to constantly observe and monitor us...". Mann wants us
to be mobile devices - cyborgs. Others have argued that we already
are! Take a look in the mirror.
The one aspect of ubiquitous computing that was never really
envisioned (but which has flourished first) is mobile computing. Like
the Internet, mobile services took off because they were at the root
of a social phenomenon. In Japan, the under 25s call themselves the
Thumb Generation, or the Thumb Tribe, because they live by their
mobile phones, texting away with their thumbs -- like touch typing.
Companies have tried several times to define Mobile Services for us,
to sell us services that they dream up -- like the 3G effort, with
streaming video that would be used for business-like applications.
But these have not taken off. Instead, cheap SMS messages have
flourished and now camera still-pictures are taking off better than
streaming video, because these are more "fun". They are not very
useful for important communication, but they give pleasure to their
users -- perhaps because they retain a level of non-realism that still
makes it seem like a game.
Technology has never developed in the way we thought. In the future
visions that follows the second world war (a time of aircraft and
missiles), we imagined that every household would have its own
spacecraft and that we would be travelling around the galaxy in a
rich utopian marshalling of the galaxy. But when it came down to it,
more domestic pursuits that empowered the individual over its
civilization took precedence. The Italians bought motor scooters to
be like the Americans and their cars, the refrigerator allowed people to
eat better. Society was formed from individual wishes, rather than
having families fall into line with a greater vision.
Mobile technology is freedom giving device that has changed the way a
society works where it has taken off. Particularly in Japan and here
in Scandinavia, we see a generation of teenagers in constant contact
with friends, no matter where they are. People no longer worry about
being late for a meeting, because they can just send a text message to
excuse themselves and reschedule. Time is now fluid; life is
constantly being re-planned and re-scheduled. With one foot in the
future, people live by the moment and plans change in real time.
Social changes
Social attitudes to one another have changed considerably. I was
brought up to believe that a newspaper at the dinner table is the
height of bad manners. Today, mobile phones are placed firmly between
the starter and the fish knife, and conversations to the wall have
equal if not higher priority than the face to face social
graces. People will interrupt face to face contact for the immediately
demanding mobile message.
This leads to cognitive confusion and social fragmentation.
In Oslo, women get out their phones and talk loudly about nothing for
the duration of their bus or tram journey --- quite incapable of being
"alone" in public. Perhaps they are so afraid of missing out on
something in their remote social network that they have to exclude the
possiblity of enjoying their immediate environment. Humans are
wired to relate in social ways, but if one loses respect for those in
one's immediate environment, conflict rather than tolerance tends to arise.
Only a few years previously, the idea of revealing anything of oneself
in public would have been a matter of considerable embarrassement in
many countries. Today people broadcast information and demand that
others ignore it, as if emulating the very wireless protocols that are
invading the electromagnetic airwaves with sound. Mobile users are
constantly trading privacy for convenience -- and struggling to
renegotiate the bounds of privacy for increasingly selfish purposes.
There are good users and bad users - those who respect each other's
social spaces and those who do not. But they also use mobile
communications as a shield to push others away.
Smoke screen
Some would say that we are becoming more selfish: that our own
microcosm is all that matters. It is our right to a kind of
technological telepathy, or to spurn casual listners for their
impudence if we intrude into their space. In Scandinavia, the mobile
phone has increasingly replaced the cigarette as the a way of blowing
smoke in faces at crowded places, or in an akward situation like an
elevator where normally on would be forced to communicate. Checking
for messages is so much easier than making eye contact with someone.
As soon as a situation becomes awkward (in an elevator for instance),
out with the phone. Many are literally dependent on their mobile
phones now to run their lives and to keep others at arm's
length. Clearly we shall all be single in the future.
Scandinavia has always had the stigma of having a difficult time with
interpersonal relations. Now we have a way of avoiding them
altogether. But this has various consequences. By placing virtual
relationships about real ones, we distance ourselves even further from
actual interaction. This affects our attitudes in social encounters
(we are "cosy" on the phone, but hostile in public) and thus it
affects our formulations of acceptable policy in such cases. Whether
we retreat or fight, adapt or conquer, depends very much on our
tolerance of others in society. Mobile, remote communication
eliminates vulnerablity and committment. We risk nothing and gain
little. Of course this is exactly the reason why we explore Mars with
a remote probe -- to avoid the possible risks associated with the
reality of actual presence. With safe mobile communication, we never
again have to reveal when we are having a bad hair day.
In Issac Asimov's novel The Naked Sun, he describes a world called
Solaria in which people never meet physically. They have
retreated into a virtual world where they are safe from their
neighbours and their attendant germs and smells . Today we see people
putting fences around their property, staking out their territory in
terms of material wealth and retreating from direct contact. It is
perhaps no accident that these cultures are emerging most rapidly in
Japan and Scandinavia, where -- for opposite reasons -- the population
is insistent on distancing itself from its neighbours.
Why am I talking about sociology? I want to paint a picture of how
humans behave, because it is humans who deploy technology and make the
management decisions. Eventually this will be a new battleground for
conflict between opposing interests.
Modern perseus?
Perseus was, of course, the warrior who slew the Gorgon Medusa, thanks
mainly to some gadgets that he got from Hermes the Telecom provider
and Athena his security advisor.
Modern society is increasingly based on toys for communication. By
giving everyone these tools, our modern warrior is supposed to slay
the ugly face lonlieness and rejection in society, bringing us all
together. But how does it do it? By giving us so much body armour that
we are never comfortable without it again? By giving us the ability to
avoid each other in reality, while clinging to one anothers' reflections?
Ad hoc encounters are what makes life interesting, but how much do we
want to reveal? History reveals an interesting dichotomy -- we are
getting less formal as time goes on (more ad hoc) but we are putting
up more barriers in order to protect ourselves from risk. The barriers
are getting closer to the core -- personal firewalls, rather than
building trust. There is an increasing spiral of distrust -- which,
for now, might excite the security industry, but which is not
sustainable in the end.
Techno-challenges of pervasion
What does this have to do with us as system administrators? The answer is
complicated, I believe, but it has to do with several things:
- Technology changes our behaviour and our expectations. We torture
test it in ways that have more to do with sociology than technology.
- The boundaries of trust are the key to our deployment and
expectations of technology. These boundaries are determined by human
behaviour.
- It is the interaction betweem humans and technology that is
problematical for system administrators.
- The type of infra-structure that we will be expected to support in
the future will be different and will be governed by personal freedom,
selfish desire, habit and pop-culture rather than by the
dictates of an IETF.
What are the main challenges of this pervasive computing for system
administation and how can we address them? First of all, we do not
fully know the extent of the challenges yet -- but for the most part I
believe that they will not be radically different from what we see
today, except to say that the arrival of smart devices will be nothing
like what we imagine. However,the increased diversity will increase the
magnitude of the problem and the rate at which the details of policy
evolve.
- Diversity - we shall have an even more market driven economy,
fuelled by whim rather than a desire for well-designed technology. This
will lead to lots of conflicting coexisting technology. (This is
normal and we have always experienced this in a smaller way.)
- We shall have to seek stability in the face of the much greater
environmental noise from neighbouring devices.
- Sociology of interaction will play a much greater role, because we
cannot cordon off areas and isolate them any more. One organization
flows into the next and users roam around like cyber tourists in
foreign policy zones.
Most people want devices and technologies to be predictable. If they
are not, then they cannot perform a useful function. In fact, since I
have often spoken about the need to relax our strict ideas about
frozen device configurations in order to allow some noise, I often
hear from system administrators that they believe that every device
has a correct configuration that should never change.
The kind of absolute stablity that can be approached for immobile
workstations is not really commensurate with the level of interaction
that mobile or pervasive devices undergo. The idea of accepting any
kind of uncertainty is more than many system administrators are
willing to swallow. Yet, this is precisely what we are going to have
to accept if we employ increasing numbers of smart devices.
The boundaries of trust will have to shift.
One area where things will change is in the level of exposure to
environment. Environment means changing conditions and policy about
right and wrong. Security consultents often posit that encryption is
the solution to all security issues, but encryption is unlikely to
help us here. The problem is not one of privacy, when individuals are
being empowered with devices that allow them to expose
themselves entirely and eagerly to a public audience.
Local regions are likely to demand their own rules, like micro-cultures.
Both humans and devices will have to be aware of a much
wider range of policies, rules and standards of behaviour that changes
as they move around. Some uniformity will no doubt emerge, but there
will always be local features. Our ability to interact at a distance
is leading to us increasingly drawing boundaries around our property
and shielding our interests.
We might want to build our private island, but when we are in such
a highly connected environment, the number of points of contact are
too great to view isolation as a realistic possibilty.
Where lies the authority?
In a world with fluid boundaries, increasing connectivity and
increasing blind trust in technology, we must work ever harder to
define our own acceptable limits -- our policy.
To put it another way: If humans are constantly retreating from face
to face confrontation with one another, then the rules of engagement
must be ever clearer. In a human-computer collaboration, both humans
and machine are supposed to obey policy. Who gets to decide on what
policy says?
Smart devices are intrinsically bound to their environments. They must
receive input and generate some output. If the exposure to environment
increases then a device will necessarily be more exposed to errors of
configuration and random errors caused by misunderstandings and
meddling.
I have claimed that we are becoming more mobile and connected, but
also more suspicious of those who are not in our wired social
networks. If we are roaming, do we have to adapt to the environment
or do we adapt the environment to us? Clearly the latter approach is a
recipie for potential conflict. The likelihood for humans to
cooperate is usually tied to the likelihood that they will see each
other again. If we expect a long term relatinoship in which reprisals
for bad behaviour are likely then we are nice. All evidence shows that
when humans believe that they will be long gone before anyone can
catch them, they break rules and laws with alarming readiness.
Some imagine that mobile devices will always be rooted in a Virtual
Private Network to home. How natural is it for a roaming device to
maintain its ties to a home base? IPv6 allows and even encourages
this, but I don't think that IETF have thought about an environment
like Africa or Siberia where connectivity will not be guaranteeable.
A more probable model will be for computing environments to supply
cyber tourists with services nearby. When the motor car was invented,
it allowed freedom of movement because petrol/gas stations were
available for refill wherever the individual decided to go. It was not
necessary to stretch a cable from one's current location back to home
base in order to fill-up! This is why electric cars have had less
success. Perhaps customers will be willing to pay the environment for
a certain service (like a hotel) and guarantees on Quality of
Environment will be song of the day. Eventually, we will begin to
accept local service provision, because this is efficient. What this
implies is that our environment is increasinly ad hoc. This
has security as well as availability implications.
Trust in clans and societies
Who will make these decisions about what is acceptable? Will they
occur top-down or bottom-up? By definition administrators want to be
on top, looking down. But that is not where users want to be. Clever
users might resent this power structure, and seek the freedom of their
mobile phone or scooter to whisk them away from fascism.
We are increasingly empowering users towards autonomy. By giving them
their own private communications bubble, we are also giving them the
responsibilty to find their own rules of enagagemenmt. Peer to peer
networking shows this increasingly. It is an anti-authoritarian
configuration. The only rule has to be mutual respect, or conflict.
Human instincts will prevail here.
Perhaps a security policy based on mutual respect is more sustainable
in the long term, than one that is authoritarian. We shall have to
discover the rules of society all over again. Mutual help and
etiquette? Increased connectivity and mobility brings different
cultures (social, racial, religious or business) i.e. different
policies closer together. Tolerance of others will be required.
In a ubiquitious computing environment everyone has roaming access to
everything they need. That also means that it is exposed to a roaming
envirnonent -- it works usually both ways: greater contact area
makesus more accessible and therefore more vulnerable. Even if we can
apply access controls, there is a risk of configuration errors and
possibly even the risk that persuasion might trick us to lower
defences. Security does not depend only on technology.
The dynamics of cooperation and conflict are complex. Game theory
is one way to analyze these issues. There are some basic results
that characterize the interactions:
- The zero-sum game: where winner decides all.
- The prisoner's dilemma (bargaining for mutual gain - with tit for tat reprisals)
- Conditional concensus: I'll agree if everyone else agrees.
The results of games indicate that, if we act in a purely selfish way,
then a tit-for-tat strategy is best for both protecting oneself from
harm or for maximizing cooperation; i.e. if one person is
non-cooperative, non-cooperation is returned. If cooperation is
offered, cooperation should be returned.
What about altruism and friendship (predictable agreement on policy).
What is it people get from investing in social relationships -- even
those they with people they cannot see? We can call it
social capital. Intimacy. A surrogate feeling of social acceptance that
satisfies our genetic programming like Tofu for meat.
Game theory predicts that, if there is a reward from cooperation, then
a reciprocal strategy is best. This forms a dynamical trust
relationship - not merely a static one. Small groups are more likely
to cooperate than large ones.
Cooperation takes us beyond zero-sum games, but when we have decided
to cooperate conditionally -- by voting, how do we arrive at
concensus? In many cases, uncertainty leads to an overcautious
strategy: we will vote if most other people do -- we will flock with
the others, if everyone is agreed. There is safety in numbers. These
are the dynamics of concenus.
So, will there be discipline or anarchy in the world of pervasive
computing? New alliances and allegances are formed when roaming --
but no stable concensus has to emerge. Humans make this even more
difficult. In mathematics, if X=Y and X=Z then Y=Z, but this is not
true in human psychology. It is not impossible for X's policy to
agree with Y's, but X and Y cannot find in themselves to agree, for
other reasons. Humans are thus not easily predictable.
Swarm intelligence: the outcome of weak interaction
The new forms of pervasive computing and mobile communications lead
to new social rules of engagement. If we do not understand those
rules, some of us will disagree and the result will be conflict.
Swarming or flocking is a way of capturing the equilibrium points of
of social conflicts and negotiations. On the one hand, isolationism creates
little autonomous devices (insects), but the mobile communications lead to
involuntary clustering and flocking.
Swarms of insects, flocks of animals etc are assemblies of "devices" or
"things" that communicate loosely but which spontaneously form quasi-stable
structures that persist over long periods of time. Perhaps this is just what we
are after for our devices (though perhaps not for our society).
The non-intelligent pieces have surprising properties when allowed to
interact weakly. Do the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle know
anything about the picture they form? Do any of the cells in our body
have any idea about what they contribute to? These are emergent
phenomena..
Swarm phenonema are already happening in humans as a result of mobile
phone communication. Kids flock around like schools of fish with their
mobile phones. They do not need to meet to be together, and final
rendezvous can change even as they approch the moment! They are ad hoc
social swarms -- they change their behaviour according to text
messages and telephone conversations.
But can we harness swarming to secure a stable environment of
pervasive devices? Convserely, once we release these devices will be
we able to prevent swarming phenomena from occurring? How do we
guarantee that a swarm of ubiquitous computing devices will be a
colony of helpful bacteria rather than a plague of harmful locusts.
One clue about the role of swarms is that socially developed swarms
have many of the properties of social networks -- quasi-hierarchies.
Communication in swarms is by peer to peer transaction. This gives a
robustness of form, combines trust in local neighbours with long
reaching connections ("strange connections") that occur in all social
clusters. This is why no one on the planet is (on average) more than
six degrees of separation from anyone else. Sometimes, a central
command might emerge spontaneously through centrality, but we should
not be worried if it doesn't. Stability and security are not
contingent on centralization or authoritarian control.
Conclusions
Do we want swarm behaviour to emerge or not? In devices, in humans or
both? Can we stop it with judicious policies (i.e. "police" it away)?
Sociology has a tendency to get its way; society has its own consciousness
that usually wins over individuals. Does that mean that we are not safe?
Security is about acceptable risk in relation to operating
requirements. This should not be perceived as a problem, but we might
need a change of philosophy in many system administrators.
Society will not be threatened by its tendency to self-organize, but
there are deeper ethical implications for society's use of
technologies. We are constantly dumbing down human technology, taking
responsibility away from the individual, while simultaneously arming
individuals with devices that allow them to be increasingly
selfish. Soon, we will have no burden of responsibilty to learn about
technology and we shall end up slaves to it -- unable to understand
it, repair it or master it. As Arthur C. Clarke said: "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
When it starts to seem like magic to us -- or when it truly disappears
into the walls, out of sight and out of mind, we have a genuine cause for
concern.
Can we expect an ignorant tribe of technologically dependent,
self-intersted individuals to cooperate? What kind of policy would
they write? Is this a circuitous route back to nomadic anti-social
behaviour, in which individuals do battle rather than cooperate in
meaningful society? The cold war isolationism is a slippery slope that
only leads to a downward spiral of trust.
To penetrate our private boundaries is bad enough for our feeling of
safety and well-being. To gain complete access to our home would be,
for most of us, the ultimate breach of trust. Yet this is the
potential, vision we are concocting -- will we fight it, or learn to
embrace it? Not only in our homes -- in our clothes and every aspect
of our being. Pervasive computing is about making true cyborgs of not
only us, but it is about weaving society together into a super
swarm. How shall we behave then?
Society will always have a face that it cannot bear to look at. Our
Medusa, the terrible face of loneliness, will probably always remain
unbeheaded, but we must not be seduced into isolation-confrontation
mode. Better to talk to smart neighbours than to end up talking only
to our smart walls. Communication and cooperation are too complex to
be trusted to blunt electronic instruments. The way to solve our
management and security problems is not to by fuelling an arms race,
but by diplomatic conversation. That means that we must deploy
technology along with education, about the workings of both humans and
machines and preserve genuine close encounters between friends. | 
