By Petra Farinha (February 18, 2009) (ambient informatics,internet of things,POV,sensor networks,smart objects,Spimes,week 4 reading response)

Ambient Intelligence, Sensor Networks, Internet of Things, Blogjects, Spimes, Smart Objects, POV are concepts, terms and ideas that are permeating our future, transposing the realm of science fiction into reality.

The scenarios described in the first reading offered some glimpses into the future, from the past. Scenarios imagined 8 years ago where the future, in the eyes of today, is a hybrid of new and old: we will see speech/voice recognition as the common interface at the same time that we will still use remote controls to access information and dream about video phone calls.
But this scenarios somehow resonate with the vision and ideas proposed by the other readings: computing embedded in all kind of objects, vanished from the background, invisible and intelligent and sometimes with feelings!

The readings in general made me think about a lot of questions. About human agency. What we will be doing if we are going to have all of
this intelligent “entities” around us that will be acting for us, making everything faster and easier to do? What will be left for us to do?
Will we spend most of the time interacting with machines and robots? Will we lack of human contact or it will be most of the times mediated through technology?

If computing will be vanished into the background, weave into the fabric of everyday object, what metaphors will be used and models? Will we not need them anymore?  is the humanization of technology(robots) one of the solutions, since  if machines express emotions and personality,is it assumed that we have more trust on them?

How to separate different scenarios that can be traced: the good one and the bad one?  how to make the good one possible?
It seems that we are facing a dilemma, two faces, two sides. The same has happened with every new technology. But in this scenario sometimes I feel that they are showing us one (a good one, I don’t disagree/ I have to agree), where all this technologies seem to be a way to solve some problems of the world, like environment issues/global warming but it feels that the focus on this issues is distracting other implications and side effects that all this technologies could have in the way we live and interact to each other.

Will we find serendipity in this future environment? maybe only for spimes!