Page 125 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Universal Human Interface

“The corporation first to market with this technology will not
merely make a lot of money, but instantly become the apex
predator of personal information. It would dwarf what computers
and mobile phones collect. Therefore its power would be an order
of magnitude greater than any present media company or
government. Following a well-established model of acceptance, the
implications of its technology will be seen first in a positive light—
the capacity for every human being to interact with every device—
and then, too late to stop it, humanity will perceive its darker side.
Let us call that company UHI, acronym for universal human
interface; its motto: ‘the interface is the system”; and its small
number of opponents the usual isolated bands of Luddites,
doomsayers and tree-huggers. That’s the near-future world I want
to set in motion: what will happen in it or to it? Is it sustainable?
Will it unite the disparate and warring tribes of humanity and
incompatible video formats? What do you think?”
“I think you just swallowed humanity whole by making life too
easy,” said Izzy Azimuth. “It may be true that the goal of
technological innovation is a frictionless environment for our weak
and confused species, but that way lies utter dissolution of our
brains as problem-solving organs. Would you have the UHI
injected into a newborn’s head, like a microchip ID tag for a
domestic animal? Well, that does put the onus on you, of course, to
draw the line between not enough and too much assistance from
our external systems, mechanical or electronic. And therefore the
issue of personal freedom versus the common good comes up.
Humans haven’t figured out on their own how to interface with
each other—at any scale of aggregation, from the family to the
global community of billions—so it’s once again the choice of
accepting the limits of what may be a neutral and objective arbiter
and distributor of rewards and punishments, or perish. But you
have already compromised the honesty of the system by putting it
in the human hands of a commercial corporation. The way out of
that dilemma, since this is fiction as well as scientific extrapolation,
is to stage some kind of coup at the top of that management,

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