Background

Abstract

In 1991, computer scientist Mark Weiser articulated the concept of “ubiquitous computing,” a futuristic vision of technology as “an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives.” Weiser was far ahead of his time. He criticized the personal computer, then the primary focus of technological development, as a “demanding focus of attention” lost in “a world of its own” and dismissed it as merely a “transitional step toward achieving the real potential of information technology.” Instead, he predicted that digital information would be “embodied,” or brought into physical space, by hundreds of small, networked computers that would blend naturally into their environment. User interactions would be so intuitive as to seem unconscious: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”