Koby’s Kaos

The sleigh is ready, the presents packed, it’s the futures I’m worried about. Less wires, more batteries, the first self-powered systems, and enough EMR pollution to give us incandescent breath.

There will be smaller devices, more invasive systems, social thought media, and citizens will be stamped at birth with microprocessors. Industrial espionage will get personal and your identity will be swiped a dozen times before you exit the subway.

Smaller die, denser stacks, and the only way to expand a chip will be to route it in TIME—4D routing, where parasitic effects are planned right into the design, sequencing in time, making your chip light up like a Neon Christmas. Occupy movements will set up EM bursts instead of tents, and Tasers will empty your address list.

Tomorrow will still seem near enough to set your alarm clock and know where to go and what to do. But next week won’t be. And next year is guaranteed strange. Remember that the industrial 19^th century left people panting over change, and that’s chump change in the 21^st.

Think about tsunamis in Japan and floods in China and Thailand. Production efficiency and Just in Time manufacturing assume constants. In our interdependent world it doesn’t take much disruption to halt hard disk drives and stagger automobile production. And do growth constants apply to the hardwiring of the human brain? How many balls have to be flying before our ability to keep juggling collapses?

So when the Ball drops in Times Square, it may keep bouncing. Will 2112 find us colonizing space or living in caves, fending off feral poodles and Jack Russell terriers?

I only know that it takes less than a decade to carry a generation’s worth of change, and now that looks sedate.

But first we have to get there. Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings and a Fun and Prosperous New Year. We need some good times, or else we will remember the merely bad with heartfelt nostalgia.

Before watch crystals ruled Time, I had a self-winding watch that went “Ticktickticktick,” its little Swiss mechanism double-counting the seconds. It had the manly feel of functional metal wrapping my wrist. In many ways it was ahead of its time, harvesting the energy of everyday movement, rather like a locomotive being powered by the passengers walking to the club car and back. (The only time it failed was when I was writing a paper. I should have worn it on my coffee cup raising wrist.)

That tick tock world, however, was blown away by cheap, plastic, much more accurate watches that we’d toss away each year instead of cleaning the movement or changing the battery. That was of course before the landfills filled and tiny round discarded batteries began stalking toddlers like shiny round poison pills.

For 2012, I propose a new national goal, an energy neutral society. While the best way to conserve power is not to use it, we also gain if we can harvest what we waste anyway. New braking systems generate energy to help keep electric car batteries charged. The European research consortium, imec, has been experimenting with human powered health monitors for some time. Now imec is demoing car tires that power automotive transmitters and sensors.

But why stop there? How far can personal power solve our need for new energy sources? Rather than staying slave to the latest iDevice we should use our Xmas lists to promote real planet saving devices. For personal communication, I suggest trying out the new mePhone, which is thumb-key powered. You don’t just endanger traffic as you text and drive—now you can ecologically power your phone! The longer you text the longer you can… well, text.

For next year our engineers are testing the new meEnvy series of meTablets and mePods, which take advantage of the sinking feeling you get when you realize the next guy is boasting an even newer iAttachment. Much as an oceanic power generator harvests the energy of tides, our devices harvest the body’s currents of embarrassment and rage even as the user’s moods rise and fall. For a special competitive advantage, our new mePod, if it senses low power, actually generates spurious emails and doctored images to your entire address list plus a selection of peer databases. It literally tweets your secrets around the globe. The whirlpool of dismay generated when you see your life outed on YouTube can be enough to heat a 1400 square foot house for a New England winter. Finally, shame can save lives.

Of course, the bigger the ego, the further you fall. Giving a mePod to your CEO might power a metropolis for a year. It is in the planet’s best interest to advance order all our products now and give them to everyone you even might know. The meSorry series curently in shameware development has the potential to reverse Global Warming and bring back small town grocery stores. A national blush might end poverty as we know it. It’s a brave new world, and I’m proud of the part you will play.

Some commentators confuse Design for Yield with “Some Old/Same Old.” I’d suggest it’s more a call for information sharing on an ever widening scale. The chip ecosystem is fluid. While there is safety in sticking with the same physical approach that worked last time, ignoring changes in processes and tools means giving up ground to your competition.

Then again, not all changes are good. The road into the swamp is paved with promising first steps. I don’t envy engineers and designers who have to stake bets on the entire (hopefully profitable) life of a device. All I can do is keep shoveling the best information I can, issue after issue, and hope that it helps. What profit a man to save his soul but lose the bottom line?

The last generation has lived a comfortable life, with advertisers paying big bucks to even associate themselves with hard news and independent commentary. This has been true on everything from current events to questions of science and technology. But that wasn’t true in the past, is only vanishingly true now, and won’t be at all for the foreseeable tomorrows.

As products and ax-grinding points of view own the media, truth becomes more elusive. It has never been easy, and it seems more polarized and vague every day. Stacks are higher, yet the payouts seem lower. You can spend more time studying web information to pick out their biases than you do finding reliable insights. Whose vision of future ecosystems will best define tomorrow’s processes, the ones you have to plan for today? In other words, whom can you trust?

Yourself.

At least you know your information is bad.

Good luck. We’ll leave an LED on for you.