This Guardian article, which basically starts out as an extremely optimistic take on the domestic possibilities of new computer and camera and screen technology, has White Rose Relevance.
Nanotechnology – science at a billionth of a metre – and mobile technology could together turn the house of the future into something out of science fiction, according to scientists at the British Association science festival yesterday.
Which is not very White Rose Relevant at all. But gradually this changes.
“There are all sorts of things that can happen, from simple lighting through computing, security labelling, getting rid of bar codes and checkouts in supermarkets – just wheel your trolley through a gate, it will be scanned and the cost will be deducted from your bank account – electronic noses, maybe, sitting in your fridge and telling you if anything is off, and so on.
Getting a bit nearer to our territory.
Long before the walls of the house became sentient, the objects within it would be in touch through mobile technology. Nigel Linge of the University of Salford told the conference that he and colleagues were already working with the Greater Manchester police on a potential project called Crimespot.
Crimespot. Now it’s getting a bit creepier.
“We are therefore creating a future in which your mobile device knows everything about you, including your current location to within a few metres, and what you are presently doing,” he went on.
“Does this bring back memories of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother kept careful watch over everyone and, if you stepped out of line, whisked you off to room 101?”
Room 101. Bloody hell.
In fact, the watchful house could keep an eye on people who needed extra care.
Extra care. That’s how it spreads. What makes all this potentially so scary is that it is potentially so helpful. If it was nothing but scary, it wouldn’t be scary, because it would never catch on. As it is, you can see the genuinely security-driven private sector setting all this stuff up, and then the government moving in and demanding to have access to everyone’s mega hard drive. So that it can care for us all even better.
