So it’s comforting to see that the visionary Ray Kurzweil (whose The Age of Spiritual Machines I heartily recommend) has, in effect, completely endorsed my idea of multi technology. Here’s what he says in an interview with GOOD Magazine:

By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain (that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries) will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. You will have a body in these virtual-reality environments that you can control just like your real body, but it does not need to be the same body that you have in real reality. We’ll be able to interact with people in any way in these virtual-reality environments. That will replace most travel, but we’ll also have new travel technologies for our real bodies using nanotechnology.

Contrast that with how I describe the multi network in the appendices for Infoquake:

A multi projection is a virtual body that “exists” in real space. While the multied body is only an illusion created by neural manipulation, it can interact with real (“meat”) bodies in a way almost indistinguishable from physical human interaction…. The multi network depends on two key components: (1) the trillions of microscopic bots that process and relay sensory information to the network, and (2) neural OCHREs that manipulate the mind into “seeing” the sights, “hearing” the sounds, and “feeling” the sensations of the network. Similarly, those who interact with multi projections allow neural manipulation to trick the mind into believing the virtual bodies are present.

The big difference between good ol’ Ray and me is that a) he actually knows what he’s talking about, and b) I didn’t figure we’d get this working for another few hundred years. Kurzweil thinks we’ll be sending multi projections around the globe about the same time that Malia Obama gets her Masters degree. I think many of Kurzweil’s predictions are a tad on the optimistic side — he thinks the singularity will happen, oh, any day now — but basically sound.

(Thanks to Richard Strayer for pointing out the interview.)

A lot has changed since then. But sometimes I wonder if the computing industry — all of it, from software to hardware to web services — really has the right priorities in mind. So here’s my list of the things that I hope to hell are working flawlessly by 2018. The frustrating thing is that every single one of these things can be done with today’s technology (except possibly for #7).

1. Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.
2. Automatic configuration syncing. The younger, hotter sister of automatic file syncing. Now that we’re all starting to use web applications for everything instead of sending files around, these web applications all need to be able to talk to each other. My bookmarks should follow me from machine to machine, and from browser to browser. Every time I configure my Firefox or my Windows Media Player just the way I like it, I shouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking customization process on every machine I touch.
3. Automatic backups. Macs now do this as a matter of course with Time Machine software. But Windows doesn’t. Well, let me qualify that — Windows will back up important system files as a matter of course, and create confusing “shadow copies” of documents in the background that you can roll back to. But it’s confusing as hell and inefficient to boot. What’s more, I want my computer to back up to an online storage facility, not some clunky piece of crap that’s hogging space on my desk.
4. Automatic upgrades. I’m not just talking about the operating system software here — I’m talking about every piece of software and hardware should automatically check for upgrades on a regular basis from a single, unified interface. And then give me the option to install or not install. Linux does this, and Microsoft has made efforts towards this with their Windows Update facility. But right now I have separate programs on my desktop working in the background to check for updates from Java, Logitech, Apple, Adobe, ESET, Mozilla, and Dell. And that doesn’t include all of the programs that check for updates when you fire them up.
5. Integrated security. This whole system of remembering a million different passwords in a million different places is unworkable. Not only that, but it’s not secure, because everyone on Earth except for Bruce Schneier either a) has their passwords written down on a Post-It note, b) uses ridiculously insecure passwords like their dog’s name, or c) has a handful of relatively secure passwords that they use over and over again, because we can only remember so many garbled strings of letters and numbers. I’m not a security expert, but it seems to me that biometric security would be a step up from where we are today.
6. Centralized identity management. Why do I have to constantly retype the same address information, the same email address, the same websites? Why is it that when I update my official bio to reflect a new book release, I have to log in to 4000 different websites and manually change my bios one by one? I understand the need to respect privacy — but if I want to share my information with a particular website, application, or company, shouldn’t I be able to do that with a click or two? We need trusted, universal services that can verify your identity wherever you are online.
7. Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.
8. Everything wireless. I’ve got connecting cables for my BlackBerry and my iPod. The printer’s wired to the desktop, as are the quad speakers and the subwoofer. The keyboard and mouse aren’t wired anymore — but the wireless transmitter for the keyboard and mouse is wired. I want, at most, one power cable snaking from the back of my computer to the wall. Apple is leading the way on this one, as usual. But with Bluetooth moving onto more and more devices, we’re getting close to achieving this one on all platforms.
9. True, modular upgrades. For years, I’ve had the dream of having a single system that could be upgraded in a modular fashion. I’ll snap in the newest processor every couple of years. I’ll beef up my sound card on alternate years. I’ll upgrade the video card as circumstances warrant. But it seems that no matter how hard I try, I have to scrap everything and start from scratch after a few seasons. Is it really that difficult to future-proof hardware so I can upgrade my systems one piece at a time?
10. True plug and play. Let’s say it together: every piece of equipment I buy should be able to interface with every other piece of equipment I own. I should never be in the position of having to struggle to get photographs from the camera to the printer, or having to figure out whether the DVDs I burned on one computer can be read on another — much less have trouble networking my Linux, Mac, and Windows boxes together.

Agree? Disagree? And what have I missed?

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Dr. Seuss have also purchased The Politics of Inequity in Developing Countries (International Political Economy) by Philip Nel. For this reason, you might like to know that The Politics of Inequity in Developing Countries (International Political Economy) will be released on May 27, 2008.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Now it turns out on further investigation that this Philip Nel is also the author of Dr. Seuss: American Icon and The Annotated Cat, not to mention an unauthorized guidebook to the Harry Potter novels. So there does seem to be some correlation here. But I’m guessing that my 18-month-old nephew Elijah will find Mr. Nel’s treatise quite a disappointment after One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Though if he does enjoy it, I’ll make sure to send him The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks and Democratizing Foreign Policy?: Lessons from South Africa for his birthday. (Quick: what rhymes with “Mozambique”?)

Still, looking at the product description of the book on Amazon (“This book argues that a high level of economic inequality undermines a country’s growth potential, retards the development of social capital, and encourages corruption”) I can’t help but think: Isn’t that essentially the plot of The Lorax?

I haven’t laughed this hard at Amazon’s expense since the email suggesting that I might enjoy Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ because I purchased — get this — Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume 2. Really. True story. Of course, it’s certainly possible that the juxtaposition was a purposeful attempt by certain customers to subvert the Amazon recommendations against a movie they disliked. But no, it’s more fun to think that Jeff Bezos’ algorithms really did find some thematic undercurrent between these two films, besides the excessive violence.

I thought: I’ve got my website running WordPress 2.5.1. I’ve got an Eclipse/Aptana installation that works well for code editing. Photoshop CS3 for image noodling. A Sony VAIO laptop running Vista Home Premium that automatically updates itself. I’ve got Windows FolderShare set up to mirror all of my important files so I don’t need to worry about manual backups.

All I need to do from now on is just keep updating the software, and I never, ever, ever need to configure anything again. Windows will update itself. WordPress will evolve incrementally. New virus definitions will arrive. Oh, I might need to swap out hardware a few times, but otherwise I’ve got everything in my computer setup exactly the way I want it. I’m done! I’m set! No more tinkering, no more Googling for solutions.

Well, I’m almost set. I still need to fix the meta tags on WordPress. I’ve got to try to find a better FTP module for Eclipse, because the built-in one sucks rocks. I need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate so I can get Windows Remote Desktop and stop paying $20 every month to GoToMyPC. I need to find a way to have FolderShare mirror my Firefox profiles without making me close my browser five times a session…

It’s not over. It’s never over, and it never will be.

Somehow they’ve managed to do it. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Sony, IBM, Google — all the dozens of companies large and small who make the hardware and software products I use — they’ve managed to put me in a state of permanent technological dissatisfaction. I’m not satisfied with my computing environment. I’m not satisfied with my website. I’m not satisfied with the tools I use. I need to upgrade something, I need to fix something, I need to improve something. I’m going to sit there on my deathbed bummed out as hell because, well, sure I’m about to die, but I’m about to die and I still haven’t gotten my Firefox profiles to sync properly.

Some lefties would have you believe that this dissatisfaction is just a product of corporate lust. See, I fell into the trap myself in the last paragraph. As if we would all live peaceful, communal, nonacquisitive existences if Coke and Pepsi would stop shoving their advertising in our collective face.

But it ain’t true. This is the human condition. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt. We’re permanently dissatisfied.

We Americans are accustomed to thinking about our history as one continual struggle for improvement (however misguided it may be at times). We pride ourselves on the fact that every generation of American citizens has had more luxuries, amenities, and opportunities than the one before it, and the next generation will have it even better than us. The reason you’re sitting on a cushy hypoallergenic stainproof La-Z-Boy recliner is because your grandpa wasn’t satisfied with his wooden rocking chair. You’re not totally satisfied with your La-Z-Boy either — there’s always something you can do to improve it — and that’s why your great-grandkids are going to be floating on inflatable programmable portable instantly customizable space lounge chairs. And they’re going to have problems with those too…

This technological restlessness didn’t start with America; not remotely. How far back does it go? The late, great Arthur C. Clarke nailed it in his late, great novel 2001. Early on in the book, we follow a group of primitive apemen led by one Moonwatcher. They’re starving, they’re dwindling, they’re skateboarding on the precipice of Total Extinction without a helmet or kneepads. That’s when the unnamed alien species delivers the Monolith — you know, that tall black slab you remember from the movie. As Clarke describes it, the Monolith is essentially a Machine That Pisses You Off. Suddenly Moonwatcher’s got these visions in his head of a group of primitive apemen lying around all sleek, fat, and comfortable. And he thinks: why don’t I have that? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do to get that?

Now here I am, a million years later. I’m sleek and fat and comfortable. I sit in a cushy chair all day with a little metal machine on my lap that lets me communicate with anyone in the world. I’ve got cabinets stuffed full of food, I’ve got a security system that keeps the bad guys out, I’ve got a house so insulated from the weather that I rode out last nights’ thunderstorms without a hitch. And yet I am irritated as fucking hell that I can’t get my Firefox profiles to sync.

Lo, my children’s children, I promise you this: we’ll get those Firefox profiles to sync before you arrive. By the time you get here, you’ll be set, and you’ll never, ever, ever have to tinker with anything again. Really. Cross my heart.

Will the novel die? I won’t keep you in suspense: Yes, the novel will die. It might not happen in your lifetime. But yes, I can say unequivocally that the novel will eventually breathe its last and lay down contentedly in the grave of dead art forms. I’ll be very conservative and estimate 50 years.

And you know what? It’s not that big a deal.

Ever since the advent of television, people have predicted the demise of the novel, and other people have smugly sat back and declared that since it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t happen at all. But I think a lot of these defenders of the novel have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a novel is, not to mention a fundamental misconception of its importance.

First off, we have to consider the question of what it means to be a dead medium. A dead medium is simply one which does not produce a significant number of new works of art. When a medium of expression dies, that doesn’t mean that the jackbooted Art Police storm into your house in the middle of the night to burn every instance of it they can find. Life ain’t Fahrenheit 451. If the last novel rolls off the printing press tomorrow at 9 a.m., we’ll still have hundreds of millions of novels lying around to enjoy until they crumble into dust. And unlike, say, the 8-track tape or the HD-DVD, there’s no specialized equipment necessary for reading novels.

Nor do the Art Police threaten anyone with imprisonment who dares to create art in a dead medium. Vinyl is a dead medium for music, and yet there are still people producing vinyl records. Polka is a dead art form, and yet you can still find people not named Weird Al Yankovic creating polka. Given the importance of the novel to Western civilization, I’m sure that printers will continue pumping the things out in special limited editions long after the masses have stopped buying them in mass quantities.

You might think that I’m mixing up the terms medium and form here. The medium of the novel is that 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood, while the form of the novel is the 120,000 words of prose that gets inked onto the surface. But the point I’m trying to make here (as Frank Lloyd Wright and Marshall McLuhan made long before me) is that those two things are inextricably tied together. The medium of the novel is its form.

We haven’t always had novels. No, in fact, while recorded human history has been going on for five thousand years now (depending on how you define it), the novel has been around for less than five hundred (depending on how you define it). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle never read a single novel in their lives; I don’t think Shakespeare could have read more than a handful of them.

The fact of the matter is that the novel itself is an art form that evolved to take advantage of a certain new technology, namely the printing press. Why do books tend to be no larger than around 8″ x 12″? Because that’s about as large as you can make a book and still be able to hold it comfortably in your hands and transport it from place to place. Why does the print tend to be around a point size of 12? Because that’s about as small as you can make text and still have it be readable at arm’s length. Take those limitations and you’ll find that you can’t easily pack more than 200,000 words into a single novel.

So the novel is, in fact, a device that’s both created by and limited by certain factors of human physiology. These same limitations govern any art form. Ever wonder why most films are less than 180 minutes in length? There are certain issues surrounding the economics of movie theater chains and the technical specs of film projectors, but the real reason is even simpler. 180 minutes is about the amount of time that human beings can comfortably sit and pay attention to a film without having to either eat or hit the bathroom. Tack in an intermission or two and you can extend that timeframe for a while. But until we’ve got gastrointestinal and neurological programming that allows us to drastically extend the amount of time between bathroom breaks and naps, you’re never going to see, say, a 26-hour movie.

If you don’t believe that the printing process hinders creativity, consider this: most novelists don’t even write in print anymore. The vast majority of us compose our words electronically on computer screens. What you’re reading when you pick up a novel is a transposition of our art; you’re reading some publisher’s translation of our words onto an 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood with a glossy piece of laminated artwork wrapped around it. Not only do novelists have little to do with the production of that hunk of pulped wood, but we’re often actively discouraged and prevented from having a say in it. We hand in Microsoft Word files. We don’t pick the cover artists, we don’t do the typesetting, we don’t design the little artsy doodads that drape over the chapter numbers.

The point I’m making is that there’s nothing magical about the size, shape, and length of a novel. There’s no divine law which states that the perfect size of a story is between 80,000 and 150,000 words. That just happens to be the number of words that will comfortably fit in your hands using standard twentieth century printing technology. It happens to be what the twentieth century publishing, distribution, and retail business was set up to deal with.

But now? With electronic media, you can fit an infinite number of words in your hands. You can hold Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series in your sweaty mitts if it’s digitized on a laptop or an Amazon Kindle.

It’s true that reading in digitized format is still kind of an unwieldy affair. You don’t find people reading novels on the subway with their laptops because it’s a pain. You have to boot the things up, you have to plug them in every few hours, and God help you if you spill a can of Dr. Pepper on them. I have yet to see an Amazon Kindle in the flesh (so to speak), but my impression is that Jeff Bezos hasn’t quite cracked the code on this one either. And, honestly, I don’t think he — or anyone else — will crack the code. Sorry, folks: I’ve been saying for years that there just isn’t enough money in novel publishing to support a dedicated e-book reader. The economics just isn’t there. (I won’t waste time going into the reasons for this, since Charlie Stross has done a fine job of it already.)

No, the novel will move onto the laptop computer — or whatever the laptop computer becomes in the next 20 to 30 years. Think about it: the MacBook Air fits in a manila folder. The MacBook 2020 will fit in a manila folder, and might just be foldable and solar powered too. Laptop screen text has finally gotten to the point where it’s easily readable just in the past few years, with the advent of LCD screens and font smoothing technologies like ClearType. In another fifteen years, onscreen text will be more readable than print text — plus you’ll be able to read it in any kind of lighting, resize it at will, and project it onto large surfaces.

Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.

(Besides which… do you really think your laptop computer is going to be subject to being shorted out by a splash of water for very long? Dude, I’m willing to bet that your grandkids — if not your kids — if not you — will have no problem accessing their computers underwater.)

To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8″ x 12″ hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.

The death of the novel doesn’t mean the death of storytelling. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to put an Aristotelian structure of fiction into 120,000 words. On the contrary, it’s going to mean that storytelling will finally be unleashed. We’re going to see fiction strap on blue tights and a red cape and really soar.

Personally I think that’s going to be fun to see.

* * *

An interesting side point: You don’t see many people whining over the (imminent) death of the CD. At least not in artistic terms. There are plenty of people bemoaning the economics of the music biz, but I haven’t heard anyone claim that the art itself is suffering for it. Why? Because music continues on. We recognize that what we enjoy about the music is the actual notes; all the other stuff (the liner notes, the cover art, the videos, the arrangement of songs in 10- to 12-song chunks) is extraneous.

I wonder how long musical artists will continue to produce 3- to 5-minute songs. The length of the typical rock song is no accident; it happens to correspond rather nicely with the amount of music a 45 RPM record will hold. When the 33 1/3 RPM record became the dominant force in popular music in the 1960s and artists were suddenly freed from the constraints of the 45 RPM record, you saw the birth of the so-called “concept album.” I suspect popular music is still around 3 to 5 minutes in length for two reasons: because broadband technologies still make it prohibitive to download anything much longer than that for a large number of consumers; and because musicians are still under the influence of commercial television and feature films. A five-minute song is the perfect length to play behind movie credits or in between commercial breaks.

So what would the “normal” length of a piece of music be, freed from any technological constraints? Keep in mind that we still have physiological restraints of memory and basic human restlessness to consider. I suspect, based on little more than gut instinct, that 12 to 15 minutes might be a more natural length of time for a piece of music.

Which leads to the question of how long the “normal” story will be, freed from any technological constraints. Hard to say, and I’m not really even willing to hazard a guess.

So we clearly haven’t yet mastered the science of user interface here in the 21st century. But what is it we’re striving towards? What’s the perfect user interface? In, say, a thousand years, when we have unlimited computing power and unlimited energy (like the characters of my novels Infoquake and MultiReal), what kinds of user interface will we be using?

Let’s take the question one necessary step further: do we really need user interface at all? Or are we evolving toward the point where intelligent tools automatically understand what we’re trying to do? In a thousand years, will the concept of giving commands be obsolete?

Software developers are taking the first tentative steps in that direction now. Apple’s Steve Jobs has always taken that “benevolent dictator” approach: we’ll decide what you, the user, need to handle, and the machine will just automatically handle the rest. Take disk defragmentation, a software task that only the wonkiest of technowonks has any interest in controlling. There isn’t any standard disk defragmenter for Macs, but that’s not because Mac hard disks never need defragmenting. OS X simply does it for you behind the scenes, as this article on the Apple website makes clear.

Microsoft is moving in this direction too. One of the advantages that Windows users have historically held over Mac users is the fact that it’s generally easier to get under the hood and tweak the gears that make the system work. But that’s going away. Not only because OS X has brought command-line tweaking to the Mac, but because Vista is taking away a lot of tweakability from Windows. Disk defragmentation under Vista is a simple on-off proposition; flip it on, and the OS will handle it as needed. Likewise, throughout the operating system, interfaces that were once cluttered with hierarchical menus and interactive dialog boxes are giving way to much smaller lists of context-sensitive tasks. (For more of my thoughts on this, see old blog posts Don’t Worry, Vista Will Handle It and Look Ma… No Program Menus!)

It’s the same long-term trajectory of user interface we’ve seen in automobiles. Look at the user interface for the Model T (pictured, below; original photo, with explanations and more detail, here). Most modern automobiles have reduced this to a standard set of four controls — the gas, the brake, the steering wheel, and the gear shift. It’s not that the car doesn’t still need all those functions, but now the car handles everything itself. It’s not exposed to the end user. If you believe the so-called experts, we’ll all be zipping around in self-driving robot cars within a generation.

Follow this trend several hundred years, and where does it lead? I talked previously about elevators that automatically know which floor you’re going to via RFID chips in your apartment keys. Why couldn’t that work elsewhere? Maybe you’ll pull into the Starbucks parking lot and find your usual soy milk decaf latte waiting when you get up to the counter. Maybe the refrigerator will automatically order more eggs from the store when you take the last two out. Maybe the polling station will know that you’re a member of the Christian Coalition and have a ballot all queued up with Mike Huckabee’s name checked when you get up to the voting booth.

There’s something very unsettling about these scenarios, and it’s not just the potential privacy hazards. Humans want to be in control of our environment; we instinctively resist environments that control us. Not only that, but we quickly grow bored with environments that coddle us. Humans are designed for dynamism, dissatisfaction, and change; despite the stereotype of modern man as couch potato, as a species we don’t handle stasis well.

So we like to be in control of our surroundings. But how much of this control is just feel-good illusion? When you order a hamburger at Burger King, sure, they’ll make it your way — as long as “your way” only involves their nine predefined toppings. And when you ask for lettuce, you can’t control how much, or whether they use shredded iceberg or delicately layered romaine, or whether it comes from West Virginia or Peru or Ecuador. Burger King’s real slogan should be “Have It Your Way, As Long As Your Way Falls Within the Narrow Parameters of Our Way.”

You don’t have much control over Google search results either. Try searching for “Bob Dylan.” You can choose to click on any one of the 25 million results pages you want — but Google determines the order in which they appear, which is tantamount to choosing your search results. (Try selecting the 4,523rd result sometime.) You can select “Advanced Search” and filter those 25 million results a number of ways, but you can’t choose the algorithm that Google uses to determine search results. Nor would you want to, because you’re not a computer scientist specializing in advanced information processing. If Google allowed you complete and utter granular control over every aspect of your search query, you’d either go insane or you’d never get anything done.

So is the Burger King experience a premonition of our future? Do we need to just trust the benevolent dictatorships of Google, Microsoft, and Apple (not to mention Burger King)? Is the future of user interface just a big pie of machine control with a thin crust of user choice on top?

As frightening as that scenario is, the opposite extreme is equally worrisome. It’s the future of total individual control. And boy, would that future suck.

We’re all familiar with the totalitarian sci-fi future where Big Brother boxes you in to a world of limited choices. 1984, Brave New World, Logan’s Run, etc. But what about the world of ultimate choice, where you have to control everything? The world has gotten smaller, our capabilities have grown larger, and the number of choices we have to make is bewildering. Once upon a time, you could choose to be a blacksmith, a farmer, or a priest. Now your career choices expand into the hundreds of thousands. Your parents went to the store and bought apples. Just apples. We go to the store and have to choose between Granny Smith, Macintosh, Fuji, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Red Delicious, Gala, Pippin, and Rome Beauty.

Big deal, you think. So I have to choose between a dozen brands of apples. How’s that a bad thing? It’s not. But what happens in thirty years when you’re expected to specify the size, tartness, color, firmness, ripeness, and pesticide of every piece of fruit you buy? What happens in 150 years when you can bioengineer your own hybrid apple/pear/mangoes right in the store while you wait?

If you want to see the beginnings of the future of total individual control, look at Linux. The Wikipedia list of Linux distributions catalogs around 200 different flavors of Linux. DistroWatch has much more. And these are just the prepackaged bundles of Linux. The hood’s wide open and the tools are sitting right there on the dash, giving you complete and total freedom to replace anything you like.

But who can deal with that kind of freedom? Unless you’re the kind of guy who likes to write display drivers in your spare time, you probably don’t have the time, the resources, or the expertise to make informed decisions about all of that. Perhaps one day we’ll all have neural implants to help us cope with all that cognitive processing. But until then, even the Linux geeks rely on consortiums of developers to make those decisions for them.

My point is not to bash Linux or to get into the whole open-source-versus-proprietary discussion — please, God, I don’t want to get into that right now. Rather, I’m pointing out that whether you use a MacBook Pro, a Dell Inspiron with Windows Vista, or a custom box with Kubuntu Linux, you end up relinquishing control. There’s only so much time you want to spend fine-tuning your computer, so instead of letting Microsoft make your decisions for you, you let a worldwide network of open source developers make them. We can argue about whether that makes a better operating system some other time; the point is that the practical effect of too much control on user interface is… giving up control.

So we’ve got the two extremes of User Interface Hell: the world of the benevolent dictator, where your control over your environment is deceptively limited; and the world of ultimate freedom, where you’ve got so much control that your ability to get anything accomplish is equally limited. Both of those extremes are equally unlivable; and you’ll notice that what those futures share in common is a lack of common-sense user interface.

Obviously we need happy mediums. We need to reconcile these two extremes, and simply, reductive user interface is the key.

The machinery that runs your information technology grows more intricate by the day, as does the machinery that powers your car. (Hamburgers, thankfully, seem to have reached an evolutionary plateau.) Despite what some Slashdot readers may fervently wish, I don’t think we’re headed for a future where everyone tweaks their own Linux distribution. If the freedoms we gain from our technology is the time and luxury of tweaking our technology, then we’ve gained nothing.

What often gets overlooked is that user interface isn’t a technological issue; it’s a sociological issue. Bad user interface limits freedom, it limits capability, it disempowers minorities. Think of how much difficulty your grandma has using the ATM. Technology has become too integrated into our society for us to leave people behind through insufficient user interface.

So what form will these perfect user interfaces take? To be continued…

In my first ramble about user interface, I used the toaster as an example of something that is erroneously thought to have a perfect user interface. Perhaps a more apropos example for most techies is the Internet search engine.

Think of any piece of information you’d like to know. Who was the king of France in 1425? What’s the address and occupation of your best friend from junior high school? How many barrels of oil does Venezuela produce every day? Chances are, that piece of information is sitting on one of the trillions of web pages cached in Google’s databases, and it’s accessible from your web browser right this instant.

You just have to figure out how to get to it — and Google’s job is to bring it to you in as few steps as possible. It’s all a question of interface, and that’s why user interface has been Google’s main preoccupation since day one.

It might seem the model of simplicity to click in a box, type for a search term, and click a button to get your results. But the Google model of searching is still an imperfect process at best. You may not realize it, but there are still a number of Rubegoldbergian obstacles between you and the information you’re trying to get to. For instance:

1. You need to have an actual machine that can access the Internet, whether it’s a computer or a cell phone or a DVR.
2. That machine has to be powered and correctly configured, and it relies on hundreds of other machines — routers, satellites, firewalls, network hubs — to be powered and correctly configured too.
3. You need to know how to log in to one of these machines, fire up a piece of software like a web browser, and find the Google website.
4. The object of your search has to be easily expressed in words. You can’t put an image or a color or a bar of music into the search box.
5. Those words have to be in a language that Google currently recognizes and catalogs (and your machine has to be capable of rendering words in that language).
6. You have to know how to spell those words with some degree of accuracy — which isn’t a problem when searching for “the king of France in 1425,” but can be a real problem if you’re looking for “Kweisi Mfume’s curriculum vitae.”
7. You need to be able to type at a reasonable speed, which puts you at a disadvantage if you’re one-handed or using imperfect dictation software.
8. Google has to be able to interpret what category of subject you’re looking for, in order to discern whether you’re trying to find apples, Apple computers, Apple Records, or Fiona Apple.

Some of these barriers between you and your information might seem laughable. But it all seems so easy for you because you’re probably reading this from the ideal environment for Google, i.e. sitting indoors at a desk staring at a computer that you’ve already spent hours and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to set up. If you’re running down the street trying to figure out which bus route to take, the barriers to using Google become much steeper. Or if you’re driving in your car, or if you’re a Chinese peasant without access to 3G wireless, or if you’re lounging in the pool, and so on.

Even in the best-case scenario, after you jump through all those hoops, you usually have to scan through at least a page of results from the Google search engine to find the one that contains the information you’re looking for. Google does no interpretation, summarization, or analysis on the data it throws back to you. Some search engines do some preliminary classification of results, or they try to anyway, but it’s generally quite rudimentary. Chances are you’ll need to spend at least a few seconds to a few minutes combing through pages to find one that’s suitable, and then you’ll need to search through that suitable page to find the information you want.

I don’t mean to minimize the achievement of the Google search engine. The fact that I can determine within minutes that a) the king of France in 1425 was Charles VII, b) my best friend from junior high school is currently heading the division of a high-definition audio company in Latin America, and c) in 2004, Venezuela produced 2.4 million barrels of oil a day — this is all pretty frickin’ amazing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note the search engine’s shortcomings. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that there are still a zillion ways to improve it. There’s still a huge mountain to climb before we can call Google an example of perfect user interface.

But don’t worry, because Google’s on the case.

Google has been making a mighty effort to break out of the web browser for quite some time. Not only have they been pushing their browserless Google Desktop app for some time, but they’re also quite open in publishing their APIs and trying to get you to hook into Google from other places. Cell phones, iPhones, car dashboards, public kiosks, refrigerators, digital chopsticks, Bluetooth-enabled dog collars, etc.

Why? A few years ago, we might have said that they were trying to escape the monopolistic grip of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. But now that Firefox has made serious inroads on IE’s dominance — they’ve got around 16% global market share, 20% North American market share, and 30% European market share, if you believe the latest statistics — it’s not such a big concern.

No, the main reason Google’s looking for new avenues for search is that the standard WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing Device) user interface is a dinosaur, and right now it’s late the Cretaceous Period and there’s a big fucking meteor zipping across the sky.

Forget about the distinctions between Mac, Windows, and Linux — they’re all inefficient. While some computer operating systems may work more smoothly than others, they’re all based on the principles developed by Stanford researchers and Xerox PARC engineers in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

What’s wrong with the WIMP interface? It’s a nice all-purpose interface for general tasks, but it falls down on the job on just about any specific task you give it. As software has grown more complicated, the WIMP interface has failed to keep up. Programs like Microsoft Word have become mazes of hierarchical menus and drill-down dialog boxes, and operating such programs efficiently has become an exercise in rote memorization. Shoehorning the computing power of a 2.4 GHz dual-core processor into seven or eight subcategories and a row of increasingly tiny icons is kind of like running an M1 Abrams tank off an Atari 2600 joystick. You’re wasting potential.

Software manufacturers are now toying with a host of WIMP extensions and alternatives like the Office Ribbon, which try to unearth options that had been buried four menus deep for years. And while the Office Ribbon is pretty nice, it’s ultimately limited. You’re still dividing up a list of possible tasks into seven or eight subcategories, and expecting users to drill down to find the item they’re looking for. The Ribbon works fine for Office 2007, but it’s certainly not going to cut the mustard in Office 2020 (if such a thing even exists then).

But let’s take things one step further. Forget the WIMP interface — the computer itself is just an intermediate step, headed soon for the great Recycle Bin in the Sky.

As the MacBook Air has demonstrated, the physical machine itself is disappearing. People have been talking about the concept of “wearable computing,” and experimenting with gadgets like the Senseboard, which allows you to project a virtual keyboard and type on any surface you like. Computer manufacturers are looking at the mouse and realizing, heck, you don’t need an intermediate plastic device that represents where you want to point on a computer screen. You can just touch the damn thing yourself and make it do what you want. Thus the creation of Microsoft Surface and devices like the iPod Touch.

The point I’m trying to make with all this is that we’re still in the Dark Ages in terms of user interface. You may feel pretty content with your little plastic box showing little two-dimensional pictures on a little 17-inch screen. But it’s just an interface, and a ridiculously inefficient one at that, and it’s going away. Soon.

So if computers are going away, where do we go from here? Do we still need user interface? Coming in the next article…

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(Of course, let’s not forget that all this time I’ve just been talking about one very narrow application of user interface, and that’s interface as a gateway to information technology. But what about user interface in the real world? After all, your car’s got a user interface, your hedge clippers have a user interface, your TV has a user interface, and so does every elevator you’ve ever ridden.

(Take the standard elevator. Elevators are extremely dumb machines. They spend large amounts of time sitting on the wrong floor. When you walk up to the elevator, the only interface you’ve got is a simple two-button panel that asks whether you’re going up or down. People often end up piling into multiple elevators that are going to the same destinations, requiring all of the elevators to stop at multiple floors. The buttons for opening and closing the doors once you’re in there are a bad joke — by the time you find them, it’s either too late to stop the doors or just an unnecessary extra redundancy.

(How come the elevators don’t know where you’re going already? If you’re in a strange building, that’s understandable — but why should you have to push the same button for your apartment or office every day? Couldn’t the building automatically sense that someone’s waiting for the elevator via motion detectors? And couldn’t it automatically sense which floor you’re heading to by reading an RFID chip in your key? Hell, the elevator should start making decisions about which elevator to send and when as soon as I enter the parking garage.

(So just like computers, these real-world interfaces are rife with inadequacies too. They’re just waiting for a revolution in user interface.)

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(Sources for the images in this article: “Google Is a Giant Robot” by Stuart Brown; screen cap of Google Desktop from the unofficial Google Operating System blog; and the original WIMP interface for the Xerox Alto, circa 1973, from the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

1. Imagine that we have virtually inexhaustible sources of energy.
2. Imagine that we have virtually unlimited computing power.
3. Imagine that enough time has passed to allow the scientists to adequately take advantage of these things.

I discovered that starting from these basic principles, there are almost unlimited possibilities. You can easily have a world that’s intermeshed with virtual reality. You can create vast computational systems that have billions and billions of self-directing software programs. You can have pliable architecture that automatically adjusts to fit the needs of the people using it. And so on. It’s actually fairly easy to figure out a technological solution to just about any problem if you don’t have those constraints.

The interesting questions in such a world, then, are questions of interface. You don’t bother to discuss if you can accomplish your goal anymore, because the answer is almost always “yes.” You just need to know how you’re going to accomplish it, and who’s going to pay for it, and what happens when your perfectly achievable goal clashes with someone else’s perfectly achievable goal.

In other words: you’re at point A. You’d like to be at point B. How do you go about getting there?

Note that when I’m talking about user interface, I’m not talking about how you actually get from point A to point B. The interesting thing about this whole new science of interface is that it doesn’t really matter. We can treat all kinds of science and engineering as a simple black box and just skip right over it. What I’m really concerned with at the moment is how human beings translate their desires into actions in the physical world. How do you tell the black box you want to go from point A to point B?

It seems like a ridiculously easy question, but turns out it’s not. Let’s just take a very simple example of a black box that we all know: the toaster. You might think we already have the perfect user interface for toasting bread. You stick bread in a toaster. There’s one big lever that turns the sucker on, and a dial that tells you how dark you want the toast. How can you improve on that?

Well, wait just a second — the desire we’re trying to accomplish here is to take ordinary bread and turn it into toast. And if you think of user interface as the way you go about accomplishing this, the user interface for toasting bread is much more complicated than you might think.

You need to buy a machine to do the toasting, and you need to plug that machine into a power socket. (The right kind of socket for your part of the world.) And not only do you need a bulky machine that takes up counter space, but you need a dedicated machine that really does nothing else but toast bread and the very small number of specialty foods designed to fit in toaster slots. If you’re trying to toast bread in my house, you need to know that the toaster and the microwave are plugged into the same outlet, and using them at the same time will blow the fuse. You need to experiment with every new toaster you buy to find exactly the right setting — and yet, chances are that you burn toast at least once every couple months. How inefficient is all that?

So going back to our world with inexhaustible energy and computing power, how would you want to make toast? Would you want to put the piece of bread on a plate, push a button, and instantly have perfect toast? Would you want to bio-engineer a plant that grows perfect toast? Or no, let’s take it a step further — do you want the interface to anticipate that you’re going to want toast and have it already prepared for you? Hell, let’s take it one last step: do you want to just imagine that you’re eating toast through some nanotechnological neural manipulation, when you’re really just eating a hunk of tank-grown nutritional protein supplement?

The science of user interface is a fairly recent branch of knowledge. I’m not sure when it first came into being, but until I find some other contrary piece of evidence, I’m going to guess that the origin of the concept of user interface roughly coincided with the creation of the microprocessor. Why then? Maybe it’s because that’s the point in human history where technology disappeared from sight. You may not understand how the combustion engine works or the ENIAC computer computes, but at least you can look at it. You can actually see how the controls you have interact with the mechanics of the thing. But a microprocessor — well, pop open the chassis of your computer and look at it sometime. It just sits there. (That spinning thing on top is just a fan to disperse the heat.) For all intents and purposes, it is a black box to you and me. Suddenly we can leave the engineering to the engineers and think about that black box from a whole other level.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about user interface, and I’ve been writing a lot of random stuff in random draft WordPress posts. Now I’m going to try to write it all down in some kind of cohesive order. Here are the main questions I’m hoping to explore over the next however-long-it-takes:

1. What exactly do you mean by user interface? (this article)
2. What’s wrong with the user interfaces we’ve got now?
3. Do we need user interface at all?
4. A quick overview of bad science fiction user interfaces and why they would never work in the real world
5. What makes the perfect user interface?

(For the insanely curious: the first illustration for this article is by illustrator Frank Paul, and according to this page, dates back to before the invention of the ENIAC; the second illustration, by Charles Schneeman, dates back to Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, according to this page.)

Update 1/31/08: Here’s part 2.

Update 2/10/08: Here’s part 3.

But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep their name in the public eye was to write gobs of short stories and spend a lot of time on the con circuit. Now I can have an ongoing one-on-one dialog with readers through the blogosphere and social networking sites, and keep them posted on news of my next book.

In addition to my response, you can also read responses to the same question from fellow authors Matthew Jarpe and Tobias Buckell, my editor Lou Anders, and book marketing expert Andrew Wheeler.

I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about “updating” the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

You often find people drastically overhyping the potential of new technologies to revolutionize aspects of life that haven’t changed for thousands of years. That’s no surprise; it’s human nature. But it’s surprising to me how much people still fall for this, even after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001.

In addition to checking out an online book event, the other thing I made sure to investigate on Second Life was online sex. I mean, hey, I’m hip! I’m wit’ it! I can get freaky in the Multiverse, yo! So I made sure to check out one of Second Life’s red light districts to catch a glimpse of the future of sex. I saw a group of blocky, King’s Quest IV avatars standing around naked with their blocky, King’s Quest IV naughty bits on display. There were a number of virtual men thrusting blocky, King’s Quest IV penises into blocky, King’s Quest IV vaginas. The result was about as sexy as the X-rated mannequin sex scene in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.

I tried to figure out how you might do that with the confusing hodgepodge of controls that Second Life gives you, but it seemed like it would take two, or possibly even three or four, hands to do it right. And what’s the point of that? To paraphrase Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski: there may be exciting new developments in online pornography right around the corner, but we still jerk off manually.

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(A quick aside: Okay, I can think of one book that would lend itself well to Second Life promotion: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Which, in case you were wondering, is the greatest children’s novel ever written. Somebody needs to build a Second Life realm of The Phantom Tollbooth that allows you to travel to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis in your own little wind-up car. I’m willing to be convinced. Norton Juster, if you’re reading this, I’m waiting for your email.)