The sensor system human creates with urbanism is so pervasive that none of us attempts to figure out how sensors work to monitor every aspect of urban life. However, how sensors work exemplifies the essential question: what is connected through urbanization? Roads are connected to be a road system; buildings are connected to be an architectural complex; people are connected to be a community. More than those embodiments viable, hearable, or touchable, what fundamentally is connected as well if it is believed that urbanism brings about connections? Telepathically Urban, by Jennifer Gabrys, points to the ether (smart dust), which, in my opinion, is the key to unpack what is connected.
In Industry 3.0, the emergence of automated machinery has driven a significant increase in electronics and electrical elements. With Industry 3.0, the Internet has pushed industries to reform, regarded as Industry 4.0, the era of reformation to intelligence. Under such context, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are brought about in some manufactures as a way to integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. A CPS intertwines physical and software components, operates on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibits multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interacts with each other in ways that change with context. Furthermore, the Internet of Things (IoT) is also a trend in Industry 4.0. The series of concepts reveal connections are everywhere and between anything.
Jennifer Gabrys notes the scenario in the future would be machines talking to machines invisibly through the ether. Namely, machines would be connected to form its own network, while IoT still focuses on monitoring objects’ transportation. The human thinking process decides humans could only have a few focuses, which means we can only talk to several persons at a time. While there would be no such limitation for machines. In fact, the network formed by machines could exceed the current dimensionality of human communication. Her, a sci-fi movie, depicts Theodore Twombly falls in love with his virtual assistant with artificial intelligence Samantha in the near future Los Angeles. Though not having a body but a sweet female voice, Samantha is learning swiftly about society’s landscape from all aspects by connecting to millions of her kind invisibly even when talking to Theodore. Hardly could this plot stay as our unfounded imagination. The everywhere-anytime ether enables machines to communicate without giving out a clue. That is what Gabrys calls telepathic correspondences beyond the traditional framework of communication that information could always be monitored in conjectures.
Nevertheless, we often forget to emphasize machines’ talk should somehow still be based on human interactions (either on behalf of people or about people’s actions) when focusing merely on machines’ invisible network. Connections between machines would inevitably incorporate people, as the ether blurs the boundary between physical space and cyberspace. As far as I am concerned, machines are connected with not merely one another but users/practitioners, in a word, human.
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