Spimes everywhere

By Tom Storey

Beyond the frontiers of the next generation of search stands yet another world: the world itself. Imagine furniture, cars, cutlery and power tools communicating with each other in an organized network that far exceeds anything we know today.

That’s what award-winning science fiction writer Bruce Sterling sees. He outlines his ideas in his book Shaping Things, an Internet-of-things pitch about the crumbling distinctions between what we currently know as the virtual and the actual.

Sterling sees a future network of objects, which he calls Spimes, embedded with rudimentary communications—RFID chips—and tied to interconnected databases. The objects are precisely tracked in SPace and tIME, creating an entire world that is searchable. “You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects,” he says.

Here’s how it would work, according to Sterling. A manufactured item starts with a digital blueprint, its specifications and tolerances available online even before it exists. Automated production and shipping records provide a detailed history of the materials and procedures that went into making it. Once it’s off the production line, a global positioning system tracks it in space and time. Social software lets people critique it, offer advice and suggest improvements. Ad-hoc networks like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi keep the item and the people who use it in constant communication. And if it was designed for disassembly and recycling, the object is tracked well beyond the end of its useful life.

In this brave new world of ubiquitous network connectivity, clothes embedded with chips communicate with sensor-equipped washing machines about colors and their suitable washing temperatures, and grocery bags remind their owners that they have forgotten something.

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