"Employees at Smith & Wesson don’t have to fear that the FBI is going to swoop down and arrest them because their products led to somebody being killed. Yet employees of software companies need to fear that some FBI agent is going to swoop down and arrest them because it’s possible that somebody used their code to steal the latest John Grisham novel."
—Lawrence Lessig, author/Stanford Law School professor

"The [computer] industry suffers from overcapacity, overproduction, oversupply, and overoptimism. We have to go on a diet. It’s an economic cycle, pure and simple." —Andy Grove, chairman, Intel Corp.

WILL IT CHIP IN FOR GAS?

Software that chats, chooses music, tells jokes, and sounds alarms if a driver gets drowsy has been patented by International Business Machines Corp. (www.ibm.com) and could begin to show up in a few years. The software, which IBM refers to as an artificial passenger, uses a computerized conversation planner to ask questions such as, “Who was the first person you dated?” via the in-car speakers. If the driver replies quickly and clearly, the artificial passenger continues. If the response is slow or doesn’t make sense, the voice analyzer assumes that the driver is nodding off, then wakes him up by opening a window, sounding a buzzer, spraying icy water, switching radio stations, or telling jokes. A sample: “The stock market just fell 500 points! Oh, I am sorry, I was joking.” Hey, whaddya want from two wild and crazy guys named Wlodek Wlodzimierz and Dimitri Kanevsky, who developed the software?

THE GEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

Avid online games players are antisocial loners with few physical or academic skills, right? Wrong, according to researchers in the United Kingdom who say computer games are giving a generation of young Britons the coordination and powers of concentration equivalent to top-level athletes’ and astronauts’. A study from the Economic and Social Research Council (www.esrc.ac.uk) suggests that playing computer games and being exposed to their intense stimuli can sharpen young people’s mental agility. Researcher Joy Bryce says: “Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people.” That may be, but can they get a date?

NAME GAMES

This branding thing is getting out of control. First, the San Diego community of East Village is gunning to become the nation’s first community to sell its naming rights to a corporation, a la Coors Field in Denver or Indianapolis’ RCA Dome. Then there is the young mom and dad in Mount Kisco, N.Y., who last summer offered to let a company name their baby boy for $500,000. (No takers.)

Now comes Mike Langberg, a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News (www.sjmercury.com), who argues that Silicon Valley should auction off the naming rights to its best-known communities, landmarks, and points of interest. Among his suggestions: Intel Inside Valley; Pacific Bell Ocean; and San Francisco eBay. By the way, Langberg says his middle name of David is “an underperforming asset.” If the money is right, he would be happy to be known as, perhaps, Mike Maxtor Langberg or Mike LSI Logic Langberg.

SLANGUAGE

Among the 50 most popular terms at the Web site The Word Spy (www.logophilia.com):

 Advergame (n.): A Web-based computer game that incorporates advertising messages and images

 Boomburb (n.): A suburb undergoing rapid population growth.

 Gutter bunny (n.): Mountain biker slang for someone who commutes to work on a bicycle.

 Mixed reality (n.): An environment that combines elements of virtual reality and the real world.

 PowerPointlessness (n.): In a PowerPoint presentation, the fancy transitions, sounds, and other effects that have no discernible purpose, use, or benefit.

 Scarlet-collar worker (n.): A woman who owns or operates an Internet pornographic site.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS....

Larry Smarr says the world’s fastest computer processor has about as many transistors as a spider’s brain has neurons, and that, at current rates of progress, the processor will achieve the capacity of a human brain in perhaps 50 years. He also raises the tantalizing prospect that we already may have the capacity of an artificial brain available to us, because the Internet creates a giant grid of computers that can work on problems jointly, as never before. Already, he notes, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (www.seti-inst.edu) distributes its work across hundreds of thousands of computers.

Smarr is well-qualified to make daring predictions. He specializes in looking into the future of technology and, while running a computer science lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, played a significant role in developing the Mosaic Internet-browsing tool and the server software that drove the World Wide Web’s commercial takeoff.

Context Senior Writer Bob Diddlebock recently asked Smarr what we should expect in the next 10 to 15 years.

CONTEXT: What is on the technology horizon?

LARRY SMARR: The next five years will be dominated by wireless broadband [high-speed telecommunications links] Internet access becoming a mass-market service. The Internet also has a vast amount of growth ahead. It is a telecommunications fabric that connects PCs to servers, but it still is rather primitive. It is only available inside homes and buildings instead of everywhere throughout the physical world.

CONTEXT:How does the wobbly U.S. economy affect that scenario?

SMARR:That is the irony: The economy always looks impossible just before one of these big rollouts that changes the world. Remember the 1982-83 recession? The IBM personal computer came out of that.

We are on the verge of an explosion in new technologies and companies that will run until the end of the decade. But many people don’t see it; they are focused on the contraction of the last growth phase, the end of a 20-year cycle that included the widespread deployment of the Internet and mainstream PC usage.

We will see an explosion of diverse computer types. The first wave was the PalmPilot. Now we are seeing Windows CE [Microsoft Corp.’s operating system being embedded in cars, appliances, and other devices that haven’t been known for their computing capabilities].

Electronic devices will become so small and dispersed that we could put sensors all over the place, to monitor air and water quality, which is a major issue around the world. We could even make this partly into a school project to help get kids in grades K-12 more interested in science.

We also are seeing an increase in memory and storage on small devices. Before long, we will have voice activation, which will let you wear your computer—an MP3 player on one part of your belt, and a Palm on another. Maybe there will be a wireless local-area-network component that lets your body become part of the Internet. Over the next 10 years, I believe the average person will expect a constant broadband connection to the Internet everywhere.

I do think there will be a backlash against the sharing of broadband to the home by attaching 802.11b access points to cable modems or DSL. [802.11b is a standard that allows for high-speed wireless communication within 100 yards of a network node, the hub of the network into which everything connects. DSL, or digital subscriber lines, are high-speed phone lines.] Why will there be a backlash? Because the fine print in your cable modem agreement says that only the person paying for the connection from the network node to the Internet should have access. The people building these wireless networks say they are just sharing with their neighbors. But with Napster, people were just “sharing” their CDs. The 802.11b technology doesn’t yet have sufficient penetration, but when it does it will awaken the sleeping giants—the Baby Bells and cable-television companies—and they will come down like a ton of bricks.