Community Offices

Gas today is expensive and was recently approaching four dollars a gallon. Those who commute by bus, train, subway and car in metropolitan areas view their commute as a daily grind to be endured but never anticipated. Companies are spending billions of dollars in attempts to create cars that get more mileage on a gallon of gas, or that circumvent gasoline as a fuel and rely on hydrogen, biofuels or electricity. Billions more is being spent to discover new repositories of oil to sate our desires for energy.

As I ponder all the machinations of cars, fuels and the like, I think of the fact that commuting is doing nothing more than moving our physical bodies from our homes to an office, to a factory or to some other place of work. As a software engineer, I wonder about the possibilities of turning things around; of bringing work to our bodies.

Some people telecommute. That's entirely possible for people whose primary work is to sit at a computer, phone or some other machinery that can be used almost anywhere. It's rather less practical for a steel worker; a steel plant isn't something that can readily be put next to each steelworker's home. Steelworkers don't telecommute. Others don't telecommute because they really need to be able to be face-to-face to the people that they work with. Emails and phone calls are fine, but they only work so well.

The possibilities beyond telecommuting are somewhat in the realm of science fiction, but bear with me as I wonder "what if?".

Suppose there were office buildings in your community that served as your place of work. Instead of commuting to a building far away that is devoted to your company, you commute to a building close by that is devoted to your community. So when you walk into your place of work, you will be in a building populated by employees of hundreds of different companies. It would serve as a place where people could telecommute. In truth, it would serve as a place where their work could be made to be close by.

The internet is the "information superhighway", and that's exactly what we need if we want to bring our work closer to us. Instead of building wider and wider roads to handle the vast numbers of cars travelling to and fro, we can build wider and wider information pipes to let our work travel to and fro. It used to be that our work was the mountain and we were Mohammed; we went to our work. Today, we are the mountain and our work is Mohammed. These days, our work should be coming to us.

This follows roughly the same model as supermarkets. Our food comes to a place in our community where we can easily go and get it. That, instead of everyone driving to farms and ranches to get our food supplies. It's true of material goods, services and even gasoline. All of the things that we need are efficiently brought to our communities - except our work.

If our work was as close to our homes as are all the goods and services that we use, then we would no longer need cars, trains, busses and the like to move us quite so far. Highways and railways would be reserved for those moving goods about, and for those who are travelling for the sheer joy of it. People who want to commute could always commute to a community office building in another community.

The first people to be able to use community offices would be those who telecommute today. They are the people who work entirely with information. Writers, artists, programmers, accountants and a number of other professionals could begin today. Because most people need to coordinate with other people, some of the latest and greatest technologies would have to be brought to each office. Things like quality teleconferencing would have to become commonplace.

Community offices can be used today by some professions that you might not expect. How about pilots? Today, the military uses a form of telecommuting to permit their people to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) all around the world from central locations in the United States. While I wouldn't lump the military in with community offices for reasons of security, the fact is that telecommuting isn't just for office workers.

Today, there is the highly experimental technique called telesurgery, where doctors in one location operate on a patient in another location by using robotic tools. The doctor is performing the surgery, only his hands are manipulating controls HERE to control surgical instruments THERE, relying on cameras to see what needs to be done. You might imagine how invaluable this could be if the surgical tools could be placed in remote locations to permit skilled doctors around the world to help people anywhere at any time. Imagine if the surgical tools could be brought to your home to permit a doctor in another state to perform the surgery.

Telesurgery is part of a broader capability called telepresence. In telepresence, an operator has controls HERE to control tools and machinery that are THERE. The information superhighway makes sure that the two remain connected to each other. Community offices would take advantage of telepresence to permit almost anyone to accomplish their work from the safety, comfort and convenience of location near to their home. Imagine all the steelworkers for a steelmill in Pennsylvania living throughout the country (or even the world), networked together by voice and video, handling their respective tasks through telepresence techniques. For one thing, that mill that has to operate 24 hours a day wouldn't need a night shift anymore. People in another part of the world where it's day could operate the machinery.

Does everyone end up working in community offices? Do we ever physically interact with anyone at work ever again? Well, even if everyone worked in community offices, we would still physically interact with the people that we live near, because they'd go to the same community offices that we do. Those are the people we'd go to lunch with, chat with by the coffee maker and in the copy room.

If you're a believer in globalization of trade, then you're a believer in community offices because they make the employee's physical location inconsequential to the job that they can perform. Telepresence lets everyone in the world work together more effectively, and lets those most qualified for individual jobs be able to access those jobs. It does nothing for cultural and language barriers, of course. Those are things that we have to address as human beings, which is where technology always ends up.

Digital Identification

There are many ways to identify yourself to another person. They can range from just showing your face to perhaps showing a pass to someone. When we show our face to a friend, they know many things about us and they will let us do a variety of things, according to our status with them. We might be able to borrow their lawnmower, but not their fancy car. When we show a pass to someone that we don't even know, they don't recognize us, but they recognize the pass. Because of that, they will let us do whatever specific things that holders of that pass are permitted to do.

That pattern carries through to many facets of our lives. We use our voice to identify ourselves to others over the phone, we use account numbers or signatures to identify ourselves to companies, we use our driver's license or our social security number to identify ourselves to government agencies, and so on. All of these forms of identification have been established to ensure that the people who should be permitted access to various services are able to do so - and that those who shouldn't be permitted to access them to be prevented from doing so.

When we work with computers, we frequently supply a user name combined with a Personal Identification Number (PIN) or a password as a means of identifying ourselves to the software that runs on the computers. As many people have learned, it is entirely possible for someone else to learn that information and then to masquerade as them, accessing services that are supposed to be reserved to them. Services such as withdrawing money from an ATM.

Just about everything that we use to identify ourselves has been stolen at one time or another. Our signatures are stolen by forgers. Our voices are stolen by impersonators. Our usernames and passwors are stolen by phishers. Our passes are stolen by yet more forgers.

Whenever someone steals identifying information, it constitutes a form of identify theft. By obtaining the information that identifies you to a computer, a thief has effectively stolen your identity as far as that computer is concerned. If that thief obtains enough information about you, they can do everything that you can do with computers.

These days, that a lot of stuff. Customer service employees don't know you at all, so if that thief has your username, password, date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc, they can answer all those security questions over the phone and the company employees won't hesitate to help the thief to all the services that you normally use. Computers are even less personal, and if the thief has your identifying information, they get to use the electronic services that you normally use. The computer believes that the thief is you.

Many companies and researchers are working on this problem. The solution has been to take a page from the olden days, when we identified ourselves by the way we look. Computers can be programmed to remember lots of things about our appearance and other things about our bodies. If we then approach a computer that has ever seen us before, it will recognize us in much the same way that our friends recognize us. The solution to the problem has been to recognize something about our bodies instead of recognizing something that we know, such as a password. This is the field of biometrics.

Biometrics is the study of measuring our bodies in a variety of ways. A promising biometric is the appearance of the eye. A computer uses a camera to look at your eye, and it remembers a variety of information about it. When the computer sees the same eye, it assumes that it is you. Because eyes are as individual as fingerprints, it's a good way to recognize people.

For a thief to steal your identity, they'd either have to steal your eye or figure out a way to show the computer a fake eye that matches your own. Neither is particularly practical for the typical thief. Combine the eye scan with other types of biometrics, such as fingerprint scanning or voice recognition, and you've made it even harder for someone to steal the information that identifies you. Someday we may include DNA scanning, requiring even more exotic techniques for thieves to steal your identity.

Now that you've got a way to reliably identify people to computers (and that means identification to strangers as well), what does Fort Data permit us to do? If Fort Data is really locked up tight and it can trust us to be us when we claim we're us, then Fort Data can be relied upon to provide all those delicate services that we were talking about. Services like tracking our health care information. Or our financial information. If you know that nobody is going to be able to get into your financial data unless you say so, you're going to be pretty happy to have that data stored in Fort Data. Without effective identification schemes, you're just assembling all your precious personal information in one place. That provides a greater incentive for thieves to be as sneaky as possible to steal your identifying information. If that identifying information is biometric data, they're going to have a very hard time indeed.

Digital Privacy

Most people are concerned about privacy in the digital age, where everything and anything that we do will be recorded by a computer somewhere. I heard a radio ad where a man was ordering a pizza, and the pizza company knew everything about the man's life, including some pretty personal stuff. That's not what's going to happen.

The way privacy will work in the future is that there will be a place where your data is stored. It will be a Fort Knox of data, with as much security as can possibly be put in place, both physical and electronic. Let's call it Fort Data.

Fort Data is set up such that you can let certain people record data about you. You'll let medical records be updated by your doctor. You'll let the phone company put phone call information into Fort Data. The pizza guys can even put a description of your favorite pie in there.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, huh? Now the pizza guys can go in and look at your medical records, right? Nope. Just as you control who can put what data INTO the records, you also control who can pull what data OUT of the records. Not only that, but you can have very close control over what they have access to.

For example, your medical records can be put into Fort Data with nauseating detail. When you want to fly on an airline, they may be legally required or just demand that you not have any communicable diseases. Instead of their screening software looking at all of your medical records, finding out that you have a bad heart or incontinence, all they can ask of Fort Knox is: Does this person have any communicable diseases? That's it. They can't find out what they are, how many there might be, or anything else. Just whether or not you have at least one.

So too, when you order your pizza, you decide what information the pizza company can find out about you. When you go to their web site, it may have a button to click to let them know your favorite pizza (taken from Fort Data), and there may be another button to let them know your home address when you say you want the pizza delivered. Of course, there will be a button to pay, but the pizza company doesn't need to know who the funds are coming from. All that needs to happen is that money has to appear in the pizza company's accounts. That happens because Fort Data does the transfer from your accounts to their accounts. If you pick up the pizza, all they get to see is you showing up to say that you get pizza #8816. It needn't be so sterile, but if you're worried about your privacy, you can avoid letting the pizza guys know anything about you, except what pizza you want.

Remember here that Fort Data did the transfer of funds so you could have your pizza. Fort Data remembers that. It remembers everything that you do. When you want to find out how much you've spent on pizza over the last year, you just ask. It knows that. When you want to see a chart of your cholesterol over time, it can show that to you because you've been visiting the doctor regularly and he's been updating your cholesterol level after each visit.

This all means that you have access to whatever data you want, that other people can put information into Fort Data when you say they can, and other people can pull information out when you say they can - and what they pull out can be really limited.

Another simple example is that you are a student at the local university and you want to go into the library. The library is only for use by university students. You wave your Fort Data identity card at the reader on the building to try to get in. The reader asks Fort Data if you are a university student. Fort Data says that you are, and the reader unlocks the door for you.

The reader only learned that you were a university student. It didn't learn your name, your address, your dorm, your grade point average, nothing. Just if you were a student, because that's all it needed to know.

Now comes the touchy part: law enforcement. Because people are not always good citizens, somebody has to be able to spot the bad ones. The information in Fort Data can be an invaluable resource to be able to do that. When an agent of law enforcement goes to poke around in Fort Data, realize that their actions are being recorded by Fort Data just like anyone else's would be. And law enforcement doesn't get free access. What they can do will be limited by law, just as they are limited now. Search warrants would be needed in order to poke around in an individual's information. Sometimes, searches would be limited to vague requests such as "Did they ever call Bob Jones?". So instead of looking at every phone call made, they would have to stick to questions that they can justify to a judge.

Or to us. Everything that a member of the law enforcement agencies looks at is going to be recorded by Fort Data. If I am being investigated by anyone, I will know it - unless the courts decide that the investigation warrants secrecy. The investigation will be recorded by Fort Data so that ultimately nothing is being done on the sly, but I won't be told that somebody is looking at my data.

So what we end up with is a vast repository of everything that we do, but we are the ultimate controller over our portion of that repository. Others can look at our data in a highly-regulated way, where the only exception is that law enforcement can look at the data subject to the checks and balances of the legal system which is obligated to watch over the members of the law enforcement world.

Oh, by the way, this means that we never fill out another form. If somebody needs information about us and we're okay with it, we permit them to go to Fort Data to get it. And Fort Data records the fact that they got it.

Perhaps the greatest danger will be that we will be asked if we want to let someone know some obscure score that is calculated from our Fort Data information. For example, today we have FICA scores. They tell banks and other lenders how we've been doing on paying our bills and whether we can be trusted with a loan. That's a pretty obscure bit of information, but who can we safely share that number with? We control the decision, but how can we know the implications of sharing it with a real estate agent or our employer?

As more and more stuff is collected in Fort data, we're undoubtedly going to start to see all sorts of calculations and tabulations that companies are going to want to run. A bank that wants to loan you money might want to make some calculation within Fort Data on your data to come up with a number that tells them whether or not to loan you money and at what interest rate. The calculations can all be done by Fort Data itself, such that the bank never sees your financial data. But once that number is calculated, won't other organizations and businesses be interested in it? If they ask to see your Bank of America Financial Score, is it a good idea to let them see it?

Next time, Digital Identification

Nanotechnology

It's all about the science of the extremely small. You've heard of millimeters and perhaps even micrometers. Well, there are roughly 25 millimeters in an inch. But there are 25 thousand micrometers in an inch. The next step after that is the nanometer, which is the size of things that nanotechnology concerns itself with. There are 25 million nanometers in an inch. If we scaled up those 25 million nanometers to span a distance of 4 miles, one nanometer would still be no larger than the period that ends this sentence. It's just insanely small. In contrast, the thicness of a human hair (100,000 nanometers) at that scale would be about 80 feet wide.

Nanotechnology is interesting to us because it permits us to very precisely control what goes into the things that we create. The universe is composed of atoms of a whole host of elements, such as gold, iron, sulphur, oxygen, uranium and so on. Whenever we work with a material, we're manipulating atoms. When bricklayers fit a brick to a course in a wall, they're manipulating atoms at a very coarse level. When chemists create a coating for eyeglasses, they're manipulating atoms at a very fine level. Nanotechnology is about manipulating atoms even more precisely than that.

The reason that nanotechnology has become so prominent recently is because scientists how have the ability to move around individual atoms. It's something that we just couldn't do before. In addition, we can look around at stuff at the atomic scale to see exactly what's going on between atoms. So although chemists could create various compounds by mixing billions of atoms of various elements, they couldn't actually see the atoms involved and understand how they were interacting.

Mind you, there hasn't been a breakthrough moment for nanotechnology. Computer chips back in 1974 had features that were shaped as small as 6000 nanometers. As time has progressed, those features have steadily gotten smaller, and companies are now fooling with computer chips that have features as small as 15 nanometers. Researchers are looking at stuff that is smaller still.

At this point, you might be wondering why anyone would get excited about this size stuff. It's all very wonderful that things can get smaller, but really, what's the big deal? The big deal is that when you start looking at the interactions of objects at the size of a few nanometers, the rules governing interactions seem to be a bit different from what we might have expected.

When we work with clumps of billions and trillions of atoms, such as pencils, baseballs and toothbrushes, we're used to being able to grip those objects, move them around a certain way, burn them, float them, and do all sorts of other things with them. But when something is as small as a few atoms, you're down in the realm of nanotechnology, where the behavior of the objects is just... different.

The exciting thing about nanotechnology becomes exploting those weird behaviors. I won't go into what they are because I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. Suffice it to say that when we design at the scale of the nanometer, we can't think the same way that we do when we're designing at the scale of the meter. We can grab a brick, but we can't necessarily just grab a nanobrick. It might stick to the grabbing hand. Or wobble a lot when we move it, Or react with it to make a "brand" or a "hick" - a hybrid of the two. All the research that the physicists have been doing throught the years are now coming into the limelight as scientists and engineers start to build things at this tiny scale.

The inventions that are created will continue to be things like faster computers and new chemical treatments and such. But as our knowledge of how things work at the scale of the atom continues to increase, we'll be able to make subtle changes to a number of materials to make them tougher, stronger, lighter and so on.

Because we're exploring a new realm, we can make mistakes. That happens whether the technology is large scale, such as with the recent Dell problem with overheating laptop batteries, or the small scale, such as with various drugs and their unpleasant side effects. Working with nanotechnology is going to require the same sorts of care that we apply to biological research with viruses and bacteria, because changes at the scales employed by nanotechnology just can't be seen by the naked eye.

The potential in nanotechnology is vast precisely because it is an exploration of an unknown realm. We don't know what we'll find, and our imaginations can run wild. Will we find a way to treat the surface of our teeth so that they can't develop cavities? Bulletproof vests that cannot be penetrated? Materials light as a feather and stronger than steel? If you search the internet, you can find a steady stream of reports about things that people are learning and stuff that they're creating, all as a result of having stepped into the realm of manipulating materials at the scale of the atom.

Electricity

Commercial power generation is based in spinning a coil of wire inside a magnetic field. That causes the electrons to flow in the copper wire, and those electrons moving in the copper wire is what we know as electricity. We have a few ways of spinning that coil of wire. There's hydroelectric power generation, where the power of flowing water moves what is essentially a propeller, and that turns the coil of wire. Voila: electricity. There's also the use of wind power. Here the wind turns a propeller, which turns the coil of wire, producing the electricity. Then there's the steam approach, which burns something to create steam (at high pressure). Coal, natural gas, wood, old tires, whatever you might have that can generate heat. It lets you produce steam that blows past a propeller that moves a coil of wire inside of a magnet.

Now for the little shocker in this article (no pun intended): nuclear fuel does not directly produce electricity. It produces heat, which is used to produce steam to turn a propeller that moves a coild of wire inside a magnet. All of our advanced technology, seemingly culminating in nuclear technology, and all we use it for is to heat water.

Mind you, it produces a lot of steam for a very long time. A nuclear power plant can produce steam, and as a result power, for a very long time on a comparatively small load of fuel. But from a technology standpoint, that's all that a nuclear power plant is: a giant, high-tech steam boiler.

Fusion power is the next big step for power generation. That will produce vast amounts of energy from a kind of weird hydrogen. And that energy will be turned into electricity by... boiling water. After one hundred years of electrical power generation, we're still boiling water to turn coils of wires inside of magnets. We're very good at doing that now, and power plants that produce thousands of megawatts of power are in constant operation. But that's what most of them do: they boil water.

In my opinion, the neatest things coming down the pike for power generation are solar cells and fuel cells. We've had both of them for almost as long as we've had the wires and magnets approach, but they haven't been as economically feasible.

Solar power works by exposing specially-prepared surfaces to sunlight. Those surfaces passively use the sunlight to create electricity. No moving parts, which is very nice. A solar panel just sits there, producing electricity as long as the sun is shining on it. That's the caveat that has made it a difficult economic proposition; no sunlight, no electricity.

Fuel cells are in the news these days as a possible replacement for the gasoline engine, but fuel cells are far more than that. They are a device for creating electricity. Hydrogen fuel cells take hydrogen fuel, process the fuel in a very special way, ultimately combining the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate water and electricity. There are few moving parts inherent in the process, but dealing with hydrogen as a fuel has problems that undoubtedly end up requiring moving parts to solve.

I've been handwaving these technologies only to bring them up and to set them in a spectrum of solutions to the problem of generating electrical power. We rely on little more than steam, water and wind turning a propeller connected to a coil of wire inside a magnet for the vast majority of our electricity. I don't know about you, but I find that pretty amazing.

Me, I'd like to hear that somebody has invented a device that can convert the raw energy from nuclear fission directly into electrons, instead of banging that energy into water molecules to heat them up into steam. That would make it a kind of solar cell for nuclear light. We can make sure a nuclear light shines almost without limit, eliminating the primary deficiency of solar cells, which rely on the sun shining to do their job.

Obscura Arcana

Two thousand years ago, there were only a few hundred people in the world who had the means, opportunity and interest to investigate the world around them. Greece gave us men such as Archimedes, Hippocrates and Pythagoras who made significant advances in understanding the world around them. As time progressed, more advances were made, and more people were able to devote their time and energy to the process.

That progression has continued to today, perhaps with the occasional hiccup, where there are now tens of thousands of people seeking these advances. We call them scientists and engineers, mathematicians and doctors. For the most part, once a discovery is made, it is recorded and used by others, never to be revisited.

When Archimedes did his investigations, he was considering some pretty basic stuff. Basic mathematics and physics as well as some basic inventions. The most famous is the water screw, which can be used to move water uphill.

These days, we're at the point where we have so many people looking into the world around us that our investigators can focus on incredibly obscure stuff. Here are some article references from the site Science Daily (used without permission):

Mathematician Uses Topology To Study Abstract Spaces, Solve Problems
Scientists Test Rapidly Deployable Chemical Detection System Tested At Stadium
Discovery Of Metabolic Pathway For Parasite Could Lead To New Controls For Diseases
Study Finds Some Prostate Cancer Patients Potentially Overtreated
Hearing Loss And High-speed Dental Tools
High-maintenance Dynamics At Work May Affect Subsequent Performance
Bigger Solar System? Astronomers Debate Definition Of 'Planet' And 'Plutons'
Study Provides Evidence That Autism Affects Functioning Of Entire Brain
Mathematicians Maximize Knowledge Of Minimal Surfaces

Realize that these are not references to somebody's blog entry, full of speculation and insight casually-obtained. These represent structured investigations into understanding some facet of the way the world works. Money is changing hands to ensure that this sort of investigation takes place, and people devote a chunk of their lives to making it happen.

All this investigating of the universe around us, in ever greater depth and detail, is what has given us our health care, our electronic gadgets, our understanding of the weather, economics, you name it. As time progresses, people will continue to delve ever more deeply into more and more obscure areas of understanding. Imagine the notion that someday somebody is going to be investigating the relationship between quark structure and its impact on the sweetness of sugar. It'll be investigated "just because", and it may well lead to the invention of warp speed engines for spaceships. We don't know the significance of learning things, which is why, as a species, we keep learning about everything that we can.

Imagine the pace of discovery when there are tens of millions of scientists and engineers poking and prodding the universe to expose its secrets. New types of products and services will be appearing at an astonishing rate.

Software Laws

They say that when the one tool that a man carries is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I'm a software engineer, so everything looks like a software problem to me. When I look at our legal system, I see a system of contracts that bind our society together. It just so happens that software is viewed in the same light - contracts. Not legal contracts of software companies, but rather contracts of behavior for the various bits and pieces of software and how they interact.

When Congress votes on tax law changes, what if they were actually voting on changes to standard tax software? This would mean that everyone could run their finances through the proposed tax software to find out what it ends up meaning to them. Collectively, the nation could understand what the change means to the entire country. More importantly, it would result in changes to the law that were very specific and very concrete. That's because the law has to be implemented by a computer. Computers don't interpret the law, they apply the instructions that they have been given. If Congress voted on those instructions instead of words that can be interpreted, then the law remains very precise.

This sort of pattern could be applied to a number of areas in the legal profession. Instead of having wording that nobody but a lawyer understands, the law would be captured by software programs that people could run to find out what they needed to do in certain situations, and to find out about their obligations.

In this world of software laws, our personal information as well as our day-to-day activities would be made available to be used with the software to learn what waits for us down the road. We could also play with the future assumptions to see what we can and cannot do. What will my social security monthly payout be if I retire on a particular date? If I get that raise next week, how will my taxes be changed?

So far, I've been focusing on money concerns: taxes, corporate law, social security and such. That's because those are very concrete processes that should be rigorously codified. Tax law is codified by companies today, and why the federal government doesn't do all that automatically is beyond my powers of comprehension.

When we get to the level of offenses that involve a trial by jury, software and computers are far less of value. That's because applying the law becomes very much a matter of interpreting perceptions. Did the man actually see what he thought he saw? Was the car moving? Is their friendship as strong as is being claimed? The law can be very precise in defining the limits of proper action, but determining if the actions performed in a specific set of circumstances is something that only people will be suited to for a long time to come.

There is much that computers and software can do for us today in the legal world. They would help us to make our laws precise, so that anyone can find out what the impact is on their life. The laws may remain obscure, exception-laden and convoluted, but they would be precise, and Americans could toy with the software to find out the consequences of various actions.

Let's keep law experts around for the places where there remains wiggle room of interpretation, but let's use the computer for the parts where we don't want any legal wiggling at all.

Cavemen

I really don't care for home maintenance, particularly the exterior. The very purpose of a home is to keep us dry and warm, yet we build our houses out in the open where wind, sun and rain can beat on them mercilessly until they need to be fixed. That means maintenance. That's just plain screwy in my book.

So I've decided on a solution to my problem. I'm going to bury my house.

Well, not my current house. I live in a townhouse, and if I was going to bury a house, it would be a ranch, a single story building. Dig out a basement, then use that dirt to cover the top of the house and to nicely slope down the sides, leaving the house essentially at ground level - just buried under a few feet of dirt. The traditional roof would be replaced by lawn or landscaping, and the top of the house would have to be built to accomodate the massive load of soil that would be up there. There is no siding on at least two sides, but the front and back of the house can still be exposed to whatever degree desired. I'd cover most of it because of the reduced maintenance.

If you want to have higher-density housing, create a house that's 20 feet wide and 60 feet long and place a bunch of them in a row, like townhouses. Keep a few feet of dirt between them and you've got a row of underground homes, nicely packed together. And they all have a 20'x60' yard on top. It'll use a lot more real estate, of course.

Burying a house is not done just so that I don't have to paint the exterior. That three or four feet of dirt on all sides of the house gives some nice advantages. The temperature remains far more uniform than in a house being baked or frozen by mother nature. It'll be easier to heat and cool. Also, other curves that mother nature tends to throw at us, such as hurricanes, hail and perhaps even tornados, will be weathered better by a home that has "dug in". It also makes the house QUIET. Very little noise gets through a few feet of dirt. You can turn up the volume on your home theatre without annoying your neighbors, and get some sleep when the fire department roars by outside.

The most obvious downside to burying a house would likely be light. I figure that's something that can be tackled with judicious use of high tech lighting, such as LEDs, which are very cost-effective and can be snuck into the house pretty much anywhere. It would make for a bright and cheery interior, even permitting color changes such as reddening of the interior at dawn and dusk. The home would still retain two views, out the front and out the back. The rooms of the house that most demand a view would be moved to the open ends of the house. For example, having a view from the kitchen and from the family room would be desireable, while having a view from the bedrooms or a home office - while nice - is definitely not a critical item. After a few more years, we may not even need the windows to get the views. Wall-sized display panels showing a view from a camera anywhere in the world might permit you to wake up to a live view of El Capitan in Yosemite.

A second downside to burying a house is that nobody can see it. Rather, all the glitz and glamour associate with having a fancy home is lost. Nobody can see the thing. You buried it, for pete's sake. Landscaping would have to take over to show off on the exterior of a home. With all that landscaping, a wealthy neighborhood is going to have some wonderful natural views instead of having views of other family's houses. It'll also make a view of a hillside full of homes far more appealing.

Fire in such a home would have to be addressed very seriously because the residents don't just hop out the nearest window. The structure would have to be very carefully designed to ensure that no matter how a fire starts, that everyone can get out safely.

Flooding is something to consider as well. Could a home be made such that it can be made watertight? For all I know, a watertight underground home would lift right out of the ground like a balloon if it was inundated by flood waters. But that watertight sealing might be the best thing going as a way to defeat tornados in the midwest and hurricanes in the southeast. I have no idea how well an underground home would perform in an earthquake.

Another unintended consequence to such a home is that it becomes a kind of bunker. That might sound great if you're a tad paranoid, so you're safely ensconced at home, but what about the poor police when they need to arrest violent criminals that have holed up in their bunker-like home? The police would have to develop new breaching techniques that permit them to get through several feet of dirt quickly and then enter the structure. There's little doubt in my mind that burying a bunch of homes changes the checks and balances of our society.

Consider the trades and businesses that exist because home exteriors are exposed to the weather. All forms of roofing would be unneeded. The industries that support siding, including insulation, decorating facings and sidings would be severely cut back. The industries that permit the construction of the heavier load-bearing roofs would do well, as would researchers trying to figure out how to keep the dirt that is in contact with the structure from doing the same thing that the weather did.

Given the rising cost of oil, the solution of going a little bit subteranean really jumps out at me as a good idea. We started out in caves and we may well end up there by our own choosing.

Now to consider the merits of trading in my truck for a horse.

Man versus Machine

In the song "John Henry", a man labors his utmost against a steam engine that is competing to drive a piling into the ground. Some variations have him drilling into rock, but the essential point of the story is that the man valiantly struggles to win out over a machine. In the song, John Henry wins, but dies of his labors.

I have always viewed this from the vantage of an engineer. John Henry didn't die because of a struggle with a machine. He died because of a struggle with thousands of other men. The steam engine is simply the embodiment of their imagination, skill and labors through the generations as we have sought to create tools to make our labors more manageable. John Henry could undoubtedly have won out over the machines for a very long time, but ultimately a machine was going to be created that could overmatch him. The song "John Henry" is about the point where man and machine are evenly matched.

The same process will happen with intelligence in machines. That intelligence will exist as a result of the labors of thousands upon thousands of scientists and engineers who will create, refine and tweak technique after technique until ultimately machines will be created that will be able to figure out how to walk, to talk, to work and - ultimately - to be creative. All of this will happen because of the millions of incremental improvements that smart men and women will apply to the basic capacity for decisionmaking that exists in computers today.

Today, we use the calculating ability of machines to help us solve creative problems. We do the creative work. Yet someday in the future, we will have advanced machines to the point where they can creatively solve problems on their own. Such as how to make machines better than they themselves are. When that happens, we will have been surpassed in intellect by our own creations. I believe that it is inevitable, but it's not something that will happen in my lifetime. At the current pace of technological advance, I'd guess perhaps another 100 years.

A final thought on this is that if we are going to embody intelligence and creative thought into machines, we may want to make sure that we know exactly what rules of operation we want those machines to operate under. Until we can figure out the rules under which we ourselves must operate, it will be dangerous to embody any rules into our machines when our machines will ultimately act on those rules more forcefully, whether physically or intellectually, then we ever could.

Recycling

There are two simple strategies that I'd like to see applied to manufactured goods in America:

1. Charge the manufacturer for the cost of recycling their products.

The State of Washington just put a law in the books that has to do with charging companies the cost of recycling or disposing of their goods once the consumer is done with them. I thought I was the only one who thought this was a no-brainer.

If I choose to make a product with lead in it, I should be prepared to pay the cost of recovering that lead when the product is being trashed. I should also be prepared to deal with the cost of disassembling my nightmare product that is composed of different materials that simply can't be recovered in any other way.

Why do this? So that companies have an incentive to make their products recyclable and/or have no impact on the environment (and us) when they are thrown away. Our scientists will be provided with an incentive to come up with processes and materials that permit products to be vaporized, or that will rot - or that will last for a very long time, reducing the need for so many of them. They will also have an incentive for improving the recycling processes. If a company comes up with a glue, they would also come up with the process for dealing with the recovery of products that contain that glue. Perhaps some substance that renders the glue completely inert.

We're already paying for the cost of the landfills with taxes, and companies produce whatever products they want, and we throw them out willy-nilly with our attitude of a Throwaway Society. Making the producers pay for the ultimate recovery of the products means that there is a complete product lifecycle that must be considered when coming up with a new product.

Ultimately, consider that any company that processes a product is responsible for the cost that their actions will ultimately impose on the final product. A company that welds steel together is likely going to be charged almost nothing. Their steel products can be melted down whether welded together or not. A company that paints steel will be charged considerably more, because that paint is not recoverable while it is still attached to the steel. It needs to be removed. The company that puts the paint on is responsible for paying for its removal. So goes the theory.

2. If it can't be recycled, categorize it and set it aside for the day that it can be.

Each time that I finish preparing food, I might end up with empty cans, or empty bottles, or even empty cardboard containers. These things I can toss into my large recycle bin in the belief that they will be recycled into new products or at least new containers. It galls me no end to find the wrong recycle code on plastic, meaning that my city won't recycle it. So it goes into the trash.

For example, my city recycles type 1 and type 2 plastics. All other types of plastic get tossed into the trash, to be landfilled. Well, if we know the type of plastic in something we're going to throw out, why don't we put it into another bin? Better still, separate type 1 and type 2 right in my home. This helps the recycling effort in my city, and reduces the number of smelly, rotten jobs that people have to hold, picking through all that combined waste at the recycling center.

Give me a glass bin, a metals bin, a paper bin, a type 1 plastics bin, and so on. Give me a dozen bins. I don't care. Just stop telling me to do stuff that leads to more gunk showing up in our landfills when we could be using this stuff to some purpose. Heck, even my organic garbage could go into a landfill dedicated to methane production. Today, it goes into the same vast pile of stuff that contains everything else that can't be recycled today.