Living the monitored life, on monitored Earth

Image by The U.S. National Archives via Flickr

Last week, CNN ran a story about the development of “smart dust,” a piece written by John D. Sutter. The article says, in part:

In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.

These “smart dust” particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.

Now, a version of Pister’s smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality.

“It’s exciting. It’s been a long time coming,” said Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I coined the phrase 14 years ago. So smart dust has taken a while, but it’s finally here.”

Maybe not exactly how he envisioned it. But there has been progress.

The latest news comes from the computer and printing company Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced it is working on a project it calls the “Central Nervous System for the Earth.” In coming years, the company plans to deploy a trillion sensors all over the planet.

The wireless devices would check to see if ecosystems are healthy, detect earthquakes more rapidly, predict traffic patterns and monitor energy use. The idea is that accidents could be prevented and energy could be saved if people knew more about the world in real time, instead of when workers check on these issues only occasionally.

The idea of being able to keep track of the health of natural systems and also have advance warning of possible disasters is a good and reasonable one, and I can support it theory. From a real-world perspective, however, this “smart dust” notion simply sounds like a way to turn the planet into one big spy globe.

Maybe this is just the course of life in the digital information age. You and I cannot escape the “collection” of ourselves — of data all about us (someone or something knows I’m typing this as I type it and also knows you’re reading it, eh?).

That, however, is in a digital setting, one we enter voluntarily. What is not voluntary give-away of information is when I go hiking in a remote place and think I’m all on my own, but the trees, coated with “smart dust,” are watching me. Perhaps in the year 2040, the Forest Service, Park Service, and BLM will post disclaimers at trailheads: “Dear Citizen: The trees of this publicly owned land have been coated with ’smart dust’ and will be collecting air, soil, and tissue samples. By entering this National Forest, you consent to the National Institutes of Health collecting your DNA.”

That’s not too far fetched, and it is also creepy and wrong.

Why, exactly, would Hewlett-Packard want in on this? And how arrogant do you have to be to think that you can give the planet a “Central Nervous System,” one that people create, control, and exploit for information?

In an inescapably but understandably monitored stage of my life — high school — I read a book about extreme human monitoring and control, 1984, and watched a film about the same, Brazil. I figured that a minor had no choice but to live the monitored life. Only as an adult, and, more so, only in those untrammeled wild places, could I eke out periods of time or occasions where I was not under The Eye.

Most likely, I’ll be dead before the trees spy on me, unless good ol’ H-P fast-tracks this technology, so that while hiking in New Mexico, at age 70, a cactus and my PDA have a conversation about how my level of dehydration is affecting my new heart valves and bionic pancreas, and they both tell me to take a break and drink the rest of my EdlerWasser, and thus save my life.

via ‘Smart dust’ aims to monitor everything – CNN.com.