Our Future
The coming short range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, will let inanimate objects: a vending machine, your bookshelf, your sweater, communicate with each other, with computers, and with you. As Negroponte pointed out in Being Digital, machines need to talk to each other to better serve people. Low powered transmitter chips would permit each book in a library, or every product in a warehouse, to "talk" with the shelf they were on, letting a distant computer know its location. Putting the book back in the wrong place, say a shelf on the third floor and not the second, would trigger a trouble report, letting the librarian know where the misfiled book was, allowing easy reshelfing and saving much time. This wiring of objects will complete the communication cycle. Previously, optical and electrical telegraphs enabled communications only between telegraph stations. The telephone permitted direct contact between people. The internet, laid over telephone lines, lets computers talk with each other. Now, we will see communication not just between people and computers but also between any object requiring attention.