Ambient Computing and the End of the World
As the world learns more about the most widespread pandemic of my lifetime, I wanted to explore how it would emerge from it, what impact it will have on work, tech, sports, and life in general. Everything from how we greet each other to music festivals may be evolving at a much quicker rate than before.
Being a die-hard NBA fan, I was initially exploring ways that sports and entertainment would be impacted in the long run. Would arenas cease to have fans and have those replaced with pay-per-view VR experiences? Could you eventually have a LeBron tomahawk dunk recreated in your living room? But I quickly steered into thinking of more practical changes that might impact our day-to-day lives.
Some of the more obvious changes will be in sanitation space. Given the need for more consistent cleaning in public facilities, there may be an increase in the use of connected devices and metering to launch robotic cleaners or spray down hard surfaces once they’ve been used X many times or so on.
A rise in the adoption of ambient computing in general is certainly one of the more practical and plausible results of this pandemic. Tracking the use of public spaces such as swing sets or park benches to improve contact tracing can be one of the more immediate changes we see. Another area is air quality sensors and touch-free control in offices and living spaces. Along the same lines of IoT and ambient computing adoption, this global shutdown will inevitably expedite many smart city initiatives. My local library has already adjusted many of its operations to include contactless reservations, pickups, and returns and further invested in digital media. Cities are encouraging citizens to pay taxes and bills online rather than their traditional preference for in-person payment. The digitalization of civic services is on the rise and will continue to accelerate more than ever before.
Of course, the way we work is changing rapidly. Many industry pioneers have already revised their remote work policies to make them more flexible, and some have encouraged employees not to return to on-site work for another year. The adoption rate for tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Teams has rocketed, but there are still caveats that may prevent a complete shift towards remote work. While many development teams have embraced tools such as Github and are using containers such as Docker, many others still rely on their code being written on premise within one server. This may soon become archaic and allow teams to collaborate with more ease.
There are many possibilities for how the world will adjust, and governments will have to play a key role in ensuring that the increased adoption of new tech is tempered with proper precautions and policies that prevent the more negative side effects of privacy breaches and unfair competition. I have no doubt that larger companies such as Amazon will be able to take riskier bets and pivot quickly enough to benefit from this situation, and smaller ones are more likely to suffer. This is why — while I am thrilled about the prospects of living in a futurist utopia with rapidly growing innovation — I hope that lawmakers can learn to be more agile.
