Open Writing

I wake up to the sound of the morning, breakfast TV program, softly playing from the flat screen, wall mounted, colour monitor in the bedroom and to the sound of the shower turning on to warm up. A soft voice tells me the time and outlines my first few appointments and tasks for the morning.

After the shower, a pot of coffee is sitting ready in the kitchen. Screens turn on in each room as I enter and the sound is not interrupted as each discarded monitor is turned off to save energy. Chip follows my every movement around the home, using motion detectors, that also determine which of us is where. Chip does have a bit of a problem with the twins, but not after either of them first talks. The only difficulty is the occasional conflict of priorities as each tries to have their tasks accomplished before the children hurry off to school. This at least is little changed from your time period.

Chip runs the household and keeps us in touch with our work and the world around us, right down to this morning's thought for the day, 'Old musicians don't die, they just decompose.' The Complete Help for Initiating People is our integrated super computer that does everything from controlling the home temperatures and environment to relaying computing and entertainment services to all the family, which proves quite easy until there are two or more choices made from the same workspace. In these cases, priorities are programmed but countermanding, verbal over-rides can still confuse the situation for a while. Late last century changes to combine TV, DVD, video, CD music, computing and total communications into digital pathways and formats have now reached their natural maturity, to allow just one affordable machine with sufficient resources to properly manage all the conflicting demands, almost seamlessly, in a task-oriented manner.

Control continues around the clock, and covers everything from simple electrical devices, like the coffee machine, as well as the full power of the central computer. We eventually abandoned your notions of 'artificial intelligence' in favour of mild forms of expert systems that supported human directed work patterns. Videophone calls, e-mail and faxes are intercepted and recorded or relayed depending on the situation. Searches are carried out automatically on far-off data bases and the results edited to await my attention, while I myself sort through some data analysis and reporting from material collected yesterday by Chip. We can also choose Chip's voice and personality at will, swapping between commercial add-on cartridges which carry a range of options, rather like your choice between a John Cleese, Roseanne Arnold, David Letterman or Pamela Anderson, depending on whether you need to feel caroused, sneered at or just
amused, rather than suffer an interminable Hal who thinks he knows best.

Chip really does earn respect when it comes to information gathering, recording data, news and weather details from the cable link, data lines or satellites, to be edited and replayed on command, or while managing multiple windows of information and tasks and at the same time following you around as you dictate new parameters or changes in work. Chip chooses the software needed to accomplish the tasks in hand, leaving me to concentrate only on the end results.

One main difference to your times is that the home is now the main centre for work, and Chip only talks directly with my office's central server to exchange data and messages and to determine exactly where data will be stored and protected. It is rare that I need to go to the office, what with teleconferencing and videophone-screen display calls with everyone who matters. My wife also works from home, or on the road, so we base ourselves in different rooms to help Chip. Another difference is that computing is no longer something that I must actively manage, but rather it assists me by controlling the attainment of my work goals, by whatever means necessary. But I must stop dictating this now as Chip has told me that a guest is approaching the front door and I recognize a neighbour from the small window put up on the screen. After that, I must catch up on last night's entertainment, that Chip recorded for us, while we were all out for dinner.

© Rodney Gascoyne

Rodney writes for Bonzer magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au