- We have never before lived in a world where your
telephone knows your name, social networks hitch rides on objects and places,
doorknobs decide who gets into a room and know who has entered, and every
place you go, every thing you touch, is more likely than not to contain
a processor and a miniature radio.
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- "RFID" isn't a household word yet, but geeks
are beginning to care about "Radio Frequency ID tags" because
of the privacy implications. The cost and size of microprocessor technology
had dropped to the point where a sensor, a computer, and a radio transponder
can be woven into clothing or embedded in the packaging of consume packaged
goods. The notion that your razor blades might be spying on you is scary,
but privacy isn't all there is to it. RFIDs are only the beginning, just
as the first microchip, suitable only for desk calculators, was only the
beginning for chips and PCs in the 1970s. Think about what it will feel
like to inhabit a world where every object we handle, consume, or wear
is likely to contain computing gizmos.
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- All these chips have the power to store information and
to transmit it wirelessly to a nearby reader. Many chips available today
have the power to sense the environment - tracking microwaves, movements,
temperature, trace amounts of certain chemicals or biological organisms,
the electronic identities of cell phones that pass by, the level of flow
in the sewage and subway lines for a city, the presence of people in buildings
and rooms. Many of them are equipped to self-organize ad-hoc networks with
other sensors, processors, and human-usable devices like telephones. Gillette
ordered 500 million RFID tags in 2003. Over the next year and a half, the
first billion RFID tags will start circulating. After that, we'll be looking
at the possibility of trillions of tags.
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- Lately, I've been poking around places where different
kinds of enterprises play with RFID chips. In April, I visited the Rem
Koolhaas-designed Prada showcase store in Manhattan, where ubiquitous screens
turn every garment into a multimedia show: hang a few items on the rack
in the dressing room, and a window on a display screen opens for each garment;
touch the screen to watch runway models in the clothing, view shoes and
other garments that could go with your selection. I also visited Procter
and Gamble's unmarked information technology laboratory on the outskirts
of Cincinnati, where Walmart and other P&G customers can walk through
the aisles of a store of the near future, where every case of detergent
is tracked from factory to checkout.
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- Fashion and consumer packaged products are today's first
beachheads, but don't encompass the entire eventual domain of RFID tags.
Wired reported in April, 2003 that "researchers at the University
of Rochester began a clinical study of bacteria-sniffing microchip probes.
Eventually, they hope to embed a handful of the devices into a single bandage,
which would be able to detect specfic pathogens like salmonella, listeria,
and E. coli. When a probe detects a bug, a small wireless transmitter on
top of the dressing will notify an ambulance's onboard computer."
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- General Tommy Franks required all DOD containers shipped
to Iraq to include RFID Tags, allowing "pull" logistics, rather
then "push." After Benetton announced plans to embed RFID tags
into 15 million of their clothing tags, the organization "Privacy
Advocates" called for a boycott. Little more than two weeks later,
after a storm of privacy-related consumer criticism, Benetton announced
a radically scaled-back deployment.
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- As part of a new, federally mandated tracking system,
the three major U.S. automobile manufacturers plan to put RFID tags in
every tire sold in the nation. The tags can be read on vehicles going as
fast as 160 kilometers per hour from a distance of 4.5 meters. Imagine
the worldview of the generation born into a computation-pervaded world.
Using experimental methods that have been developed to study the ways people
react to one another, Stanford researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass
substituted automatic devices such as computers, or even representations
of people such as video images, for one of the parties in classic two-person
social psychology experiments. They found that although people claim that
they know the difference between humans and machines, their cognitive,
emotional, and behavioral responses to artificial representations of humans
are identical to the reactions they have to real people. Humans evolved
to pay close attention to other people, to the way people treat us, to
facial expressions and tone of voice. Our artifacts might be in the information
age, but our biology is still prehistoric
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- As we head into this world where the lines between things
and human intelligence is blurred, work of people like Reeves and Nash
raises a disturbing possibility: the generations born after 2010 will grow
up to think techno-animistically. "Techno-animism" is a term
that Mark Pesce used to describe the future of computerized toys, and it's
a fitting description of the disturbing psychological implications raised
by Reeves and Nash and others. Among the more predictable effects of rooms
or shirts that call us by name is the probability that people will project
unwarranted intelligence upon things and places that convey information
but actually know nothing.
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- http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100132&threshold=-1
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