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'Smart' Technology Promises Efficiency but Raises Questions

By Heather Sells
CBN News Reporter

CBN.com – (CBN News) - Are you the master of your machines, or do they master you? What if your machines talked to each other? And what if they talked to you?

Big business is investing millions of dollars to get ready to put computers into more of your everyday life. This jump to the future carries a promise of efficiency, but brings with it the potential to invade our privacy like never before.

Inside the grand buildings at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a quiet revolution is taking place. Researchers are working to make our machines smarter than ever.

The Consumer Electronics Lab calls one display "Smart Architectural Surfaces." Each tile talks to another through a wireless network. Working as a team, they create a design.

It is the latest concept: putting computers with common, everyday objects, and then letting these objects talk to each other. It is called “The Internet of Things.”

Dr. Michael Bove, director of MIT’s Consumer Electronics Lab, said, “What I would call ‘the plumbing phase’ is now fixed. You can get as much information as possible from anything to anything very inexpensively. What you don't have is the ability for these devices to get the sense that "thing a" needs to talk to "thing b" in order to do something on your behalf.”

To show how this can work in ordinary situations, meet “Clocky.” Clocky is the smart alarm clock you could grow to love--or hate. When you hit the snooze button, it rolls away, forcing you to roll out of bed and find it. Computer chips send it to a different spot every time.

One stuffed animal is really a cell phone in disguise. But when you get a call, it doesn’t ring or vibrate. It catches your eye with gazes and small gestures.

But the revolutionary part of these intriguing devices is not simply their smartness. The paradigm shift centers around their ability to talk to each other.

Case in point: a purse. It contains fabric squares embedded with computer chips and sensors. Each square functions independently and communicates with the other squares. One square turns on the light in the purse. Another checks for your wallet.

Bove likes to think of such smart devices and people as being in a modern-day ecosystem. That ecosystem includes relationships between things and people. Imagine a "thing" that could understand your emotions.

MIT Media Lab’s Shaundra Daily uses computer sensors to gauge emotions. One evaluates facial movements like head nods, smiles, and frowns.

“Once it can center in on where my eyes are,” Daily explained, “it can decide where I’m looking.”

Her field of study, called affective--or emotional--computing, is less than 10 years old. But it has already created a host of devices that measure mood.

The idea is, if computers can understand our emotions, they can adapt to and better serve us. It is like a teacher who changes a lesson plan for students who are bored or frustrated.

For example, one chair in the lab looks just like a regular chair, but it is actually a very smart chair. It is designed to measure how bored or interested its occupant is, based on the occupant’s posture. The chair takes a look at whether the person in it is leaning forward, leaning back, or leaning to the side and how often the person is moving around.

Other tools include skin sensors. A “pressure mouse” monitors the intensity of your grip.

“Probably no one sensor by itself will tell you--'this is the emotional state'--but as we begin combining sensors, we can get a better sense of what the user's emotion is,” Daily said.

A computer program being developed at the MIT lab encourages users to exercise.

A digital voice says, “’Laura’ --sounds like you're having a really hard time. I hope things get better. Can I offer a suggestion? A little exercise can...”

This computer model promotes walking to relieve stress. Shaundra and others hope interactions like this will enrich the elderly and help students academically.

But what about the Internet of Things--a world in which our stuff communicates with each other? What's the end goal of that?
Bove thinks that networked devices will improve our communication and make life easier.

“We're looking at making your life, ultimately, less technology-centered,” Bove said. “If we do a really good job of this, you won't think about all the devices in your house that have microprocessors in them, because they'll basically fade into the background.”

But fading into the background is exactly what privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht is worried about. Albrecht's consumer organization, Caspian, is waging a campaign to educate the public about RFID technology.

RFID means "Radio Frequency Identification." It consists of a tiny silicon computer chip and an antenna that a remote reader can scan and send to a database. RFID is the backbone of the Internet of Things, and it is already big business.

This year, for example, Wal-Mart is leading the RFID charge, requiring all suppliers to use RFID computer chips on their pallets and cases, making it easier to track products. Even the U.S. military uses RFID to track supplies around the globe.

“You've literally got some of the biggest corporations on the globe spending hundred of millions of dollars already in the infrastructure, to make every object on Earth trackable, and then you've got the public, who really has no idea that this technology is coming,” Albrecht said.

Just one tiny tube at the MIT lab can hold 150 RFID computer chips. Their small size means companies or the government can easily hide them.

Each chip can give a unique serial number to every product. And then, with the help of its attached antenna, remote scanners read the RFID tags, even through materials like fabric and plastic.

“Right now,” Albrecht said, “everywhere in the U.S., it is perfectly legal for a company to place an RFID tag, say, in your shoes, between layers--we've seen that at a trade show --sell that pair of shoes to you and sell it as a tracking device.”

Albrecht, the ACLU and other civil liberty groups want a public assessment of the technology. But so far, they've found few friends in Washington.

Although Bove calls the technology neutral and is quick to praise the benefits, he agrees that consumers need safeguards.
For Albrecht, a first step would be labeling all RFID products.

“When you really envision a world in which every physical number can be numbered and tracked, a physical world in which people can be numbered and tracked, and in which RFID implants can be put into individuals and maybe even babies at birth -- and every move that we make can be identified and logged into a computer database--you begin to raise some very frightening questions, I think, about power,” said Albrecht.

“If all this information lives in your house--that's the first line of defense,” Bove said. “I think we need to have much stronger protections about the abilities of others to reach in and pull out that stuff, but I think the technologies for that exist. It's a matter of making those technologies automatic and self-maintaining.”

Such discussions are only beginning in Washington. But a full-fledged debate may need to take place in the very near future. Bove predicts that “The Internet of Things” is coming to your home soon. Most likely, he says, in the next five years.

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