Scott Adams' Blog

Predicting Israel

Posted November 16th, 2012 @ 2:41pm in #General Nonsense

In my book The Religion War, written ten years ago, I predicted a future in which terrorists could destroy anything above ground whenever they wanted. They simply used inexpensive drones with electronics no more sophisticated than an Android app.

Fast-forward to today, Iran is sending drones to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah has training camps right next to Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. Meanwhile, Hamas has its own drone production facility, or did, until Israel found it. One presumes Hamas will build more. How long will it be before Israel is facing suicide drones that only cost its enemies $100 apiece, fit in the trunk of a car, and can guide themselves to within 20 feet of any target? I’d say five years.

So what happens when the drone attacks start happening in volume? Let’s game this out. My assumption is that the coming inevitable wave of hobby-sized suicide drones will be unstoppable because they will fly low to their target and be so numerous that no defense will be effective. I predict it will be too dangerous to live above ground in Israel within ten years unless the trend is reversed. But what could stop the trend?

Surely the terrorists won’t give up. Surely Iran and others will keep the terrorists well-supplied. Surely Israel can’t conquer every pocket of terrorism in the region. And surely Israel won’t surrender and walk away.

It’s your turn to be a futurist. Please describe in the comments any scenario you can imagine in which Israeli cities are still habitable in ten years. And be sure to give your best guess on the odds of your scenario playing out.

The Shirtless FBI Guy

Posted November 15th, 2012 @ 3:23pm in #General Nonsense

Perhaps you read the so-called “news” in the United States that an obsessed FBI agent sent a photo of himself, shirtless, to a married woman who is connected to the story of General Patreus and his extra-marital affair. That’s what I call a story! Sex, power, wow!

Days pass. Now a lawyer for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association explains that the photo was in a larger context of the two families who have been social friends for years sending joke photos to each other on a regular basis. The picture in question showed the agent humorously standing between two firing-range dummies that I assume were also shirtless.

Boring!!!!

I hate it when context ruins a good news story.

But wait, there’s still hope. Do you trust a lawyer whose job description involves manipulating the truth? Or do you trust the free press whose mission is to bring you accurate and useful news?

I’m going with the lawyer on this one.

But I give the free press credit for turning a bunch of nothing into two interesting stories. The first story was the salacious tale of an obsessed stalker in the FBI. The second story was the correction in which the FBI agent is revealed to be just a family man with a good sense of humor. I’d like to be on that FBI agent’s joke list. The firing-range picture actually sounds funny.

 

Guilty by Headline

Posted November 14th, 2012 @ 2:26pm in #General Nonsense

I’ve noticed that whenever the media wants to demonize a public figure, they follow a specific pattern:

1.      Quote the public figure out of context to make him look more ridiculous than usual.

2.      When the public figure tries to put the quote back in context, the headlines the next day will say, “[Public Figure] Doubles Down”

3.      When the public figure tries to clarify a hasty remark, or one taken out of context, the headline is “[Public Figure] Backpedals on Earlier Remarks.”

Backpedaling and doubling down are words the media use to signal their opinion that the figure in question is an unscrupulous weasel. It also helps distract from the fact that the media often invents news by removing context. Doubling down sounds a lot better than the more accurate alternative: “Public Figure Correctly Points Out that We Manufactured News by Removing Context.”

If you Google “doubles down” “Romney” you will discover that Romney allegedly doubled down on…

1.      Criticism of embassy attacks
2.      The 47% controversy
3.      False Jeep claims
4.      Defunding National Public Radio
5.      Obama’s “Apology Tour”
6.      Vouchercare
7.      Russia as geopolitical adversary
8.      “extreme” immigration positions

Do a similar search for “doubles down” and “Obama” and you find that the President doubled down on…

1.      History
2.      Tax hikes
3.      About not apologizing
4.      On “oddly incoherent critique of Romney”
5.      Bain Capital attacks
6.      Romney’s op-ed about automaker support
7.      Biden’s claim that middle class ‘buried’
8.      Big government

Meanwhile, Romney “backpedalled” on…

1.      47% comment
2.      Deportations
3.      FEMA
4.      Abortion

And President Obama “backpedalled” on…

1.      Economy being fine
2.      “above my pay grade” comment
3.      Libya attacks
4.      Keystone pipeline
5.      Private sector remarks
6.      Sequestration
7.      Ahmadinijad “elected” remark
8.      Gay marriage

You will not be surprised to learn that liberal media sites more often accused Romney of back pedaling and doubling down while conservative media sites more often say the same about President Obama.

My advice is that whenever you see backpedalling or doubling down in an alleged news story, stop reading immediately. The writer and the editor for that piece are trying to manipulate you into a belief that would not necessarily be supported by the facts within their proper context.

Freedom Metric

Posted November 12th, 2012 @ 3:50pm in #General Nonsense

Every society sorts human behavior into right and wrong. The problem with this model is that people don’t always agree on what is wrong. To solve the occasional ambiguity over right and wrong, suppose society organized around the idea that all laws and ethical standards should be designed to maximize cumulative human freedom. Would the world end up in a better place by focusing on freedom instead of what is “right”?

Our definition of freedom would have to account for the fact that a healthy person with money has more freedom than someone who is sick and poor. A legitimate pursuit of freedom would include attention to the economy, education, healthcare, and the things we value most.  And we’d still maintain most laws so citizens could enjoy the freedom of living without fear. Given all the things that would be the same, where would a focus on freedom make a difference?

Consider the case of David Petraeus and his admitted affair with his biographer. Under the standard model of right-and-wrong, his actions were clearly wrong and he had no choice but to resign his job as head of the CIA. But what if we apply the freedom metric instead? As a citizen, I don’t want to lose the option of having Petraeus as the head of the CIA. Freedom-wise, the citizens of the United States came out behind when Petraeus resigned. We lost an option.

In the Petraeus situation, there are some practical issues to consider. You don’t want the head of the CIA to be susceptible to blackmail. But keep in mind that a leader is only susceptible to that sort of blackmail when society limits his freedom to have sex with willing partners. A focus on freedom would get you closer to a French situation in which a leader’s alleged affair would be met with shrugs.

The freedom metric would create a libertarian-looking world where no one cares about victimless crimes. That part is obvious. What is less obvious is how we’d treat tax policy under a freedom-focused world. Wouldn’t a freedom-focused world always soak the rich on taxes?

An extra dollar to a billionaire will have no impact on his freedom. But an extra dollar to a poor person gives him the option of eating. If freedom is the goal, you want to transfer wealth away from the rich until you reach the point where transferring one more dollar would decrease the world’s total supply of freedom. It could look a lot like communism if you do it wrong, and we know that wouldn’t work out.

The hard part of maximizing freedom is preserving capitalist incentives. If people get all the freedom they need without working, why would they ever work? The system would fall apart. To increase the world’s freedom, we need a system in which the rich transfer wealth to the poor without ruining the motivation of the people on the receiving end. Luckily for you, I have just the idea for that.

Suppose the rich are taxed not on income but on the risk class of their assets? In other words, a billionaire would be taxed extra for keeping money sitting around in treasury bills, or third homes, or cash-like investments. Only the assets that are actively devoted to business enterprises would be tax-free.

With that sort of system, billionaires would invest their boring assets in riskier ways that would stimulate the economy and create jobs. If the risky investments don’t work out, the billionaire’s lifestyle barely changes, but in the meantime it creates a lot of jobs. The net outcome of such a system is more freedom while preserving capitalist incentives. The billionaire gives up the freedom to keep boring assets sidelined and untaxed, but there’s no real impact on the billionaire’s day-to-day freedom. The world comes out ahead, freedom-wise.

Abortion would be a tricky issue if you remove right and wrong from the equation and focus on freedom instead. Society would need to compare the freedom that a woman would sacrifice by having an unwanted child, and the impact that would have on others as well, versus the potential freedom of the fetus.  That sidesteps the question of when life begins. The starting point of life only matters if you are talking about the rights of the living. If you’re talking about potential for freedom, a fetus of any age has it. Personally, I’m pro-choice, for purely practical reasons. If freedom were my top priority, would my opinion on abortion rights change?

A focus on freedom will skewer the sacred cows on both sides of the aisle. Conservatives might have to live with higher taxes on the rich, and liberals might lose their strongest argument for abortion rights.

How committed are we to this freedom thing?

Larry Page’s Voice Update

Posted November 8th, 2012 @ 9:55pm in #General Nonsense

In July I blogged about Google founder Larry Page’s reported voice problem. I speculated that Page might have the same voice issue I had, called spasmodic dysphonia.

My reasoning was that spasmodic dysphonia is often - perhaps even usually - incorrectly diagnosed as a psychological problem. That was the only reason I could imagine for Google’s silence on the specifics of his voice issues. If Page had any other kind of voice problem the company would have simply described it.

Today I did a Google search to see if there was an update. Page recently appeared in public and spoke in a way that will strike most listeners as unusual. His voice is breathy, weak, and quite different from his old voice that you can hear on this clip. The good news is that his voice is functional.

Page’s new voice is identical to the sound of a patient with spasmodic dysphonia after getting Botox injections to the vocal cords to control involuntary spasms. I recognize the distinctive sound because I had that sort of treatment for about six months. I sounded exactly the same. And I can rule out the possibility that Page had throat surgery for spasmodic dysphonia because that would have left an obvious scar on the front of his neck.

Botox injections through the front of the neck to the vocal cords are the most common treatment for Spasmodic Dysphonia. The problem - and it’s a huge one - is that the Botox is always ramping up or wearing off. Your voice is only good for a brief window in which the dose is at the just-right phase. Every few months you have to go in for a new shot, which is extraordinarily unpleasant if needles creep you out. It’s an extra-thick needle that pushes through the front of the throat and - if the doctor is either skilled or lucky - finds the vocal cords one-at-a-time. In my case, I got a different result after every injection; sometimes it worked well, sometimes not. I later learned that one of my vocal cords is in an unusual position, which probably explains why my results were spotty.

I tried the Botox injections for several months before realizing it wasn’t for me. I’ve heard it works well for some people. In the end, my solution was surgery with a doctor who invented the approach he used.

Obviously I’m only speculating about Page’s voice condition. But I’ll renew my offer to explain the surgery option to Larry if it turns out he has spasmodic dysphonia and is interested in alternatives. I can be reached at dilbertcartoonist@gmail.com.

The Privacy Illusion

Posted November 6th, 2012 @ 2:44pm in #General Nonsense

Guardians of Privacy

Posted November 5th, 2012 @ 3:36pm in #General Nonsense

Sultans used eunuchs to guard their harems. The Vatican uses Swiss Guards for protection. In Harry Potter’s world, goblins operate the Gingotts Wizarding bank. Apparently there is a right kind of guardian for every type of asset. I was thinking about this as I wondered about the best way to protect personal information. My suggestion is nuns.

I would trust nuns to guard my personal information in the cloud. I would also trust nuns to keep the government from getting my information and using it for evil. But I would limit the job to nuns who have been in the habit, so to speak, for at least twenty years. That sort of person is unlikely to suddenly turn evil and accept a bribe. And nuns don’t fear death because they are sure the afterlife is an upgrade. I think nuns would be well -suited to resisting government pressure.

Now that we have trustworthy guardians of privacy, how can this arrangement make the world a better place? What useful applications would be possible if the government mandated that the location of your phone and your automobile must always be broadcast via Internet to a nun-protected database? Let’s say the government gives the phone industry and the auto industry five years to meet this new location-awareness standard, including retrofitting old cars. And let’s add some video cameras to the inside and inside of cars while we’re at it.

I would think that in this imagined future, transportation energy costs would drop by about 20%. I’ll give you a few reasons why. For starters, all parking spaces could be wired with sensors so no one ever has to circle the block looking for a place to park. When your car enters a neighborhood, it accesses the parking database and displays the nearest available spots on its navigation screen.

Now imagine all cars have the new technology that lets you see your own car as if you are above it. I already have that feature on my car, thanks to side and rear cameras; it makes parking a snap. I literally park the car as if I’m playing a video game. I just look at the navigation screen and maneuver the animated depiction of my car into the actual space that my side and rear cameras are showing. Parallel parking is one clean motion every time. It’s frickin’ magic. Let’s imagine that streetlights someday have cameras that your car can only view when you are directly below. That gives every driver a bird’s eye view of street parking even without side and rear cameras.

We can get rid of speed traps in this future world. If your car exceeds the speed limit by ten miles per hour, your car gives you a warning that a ticket will be issued by email if you continue. If you continue anyway, you get an email within minutes advising you that your checking account or credit card has already been debited the amount of the ticket. That should save a lot of time and money for enforcement. And it will save on gas as well, since speeding uses more fuel than obeying the speed limit.

The offset to that savings might be higher average speed limits on all roads because driving would be so much safer with this new technology. I could imagine, for example, that in foggy conditions the speed limit would decrease automatically and notify all cars accordingly. Perhaps the system can even change speed limits dynamically depending on the driving records of everyone on the road at any given moment. During school hours, for example, you might find that the average quality of drivers is very high (because no kids are driving) and relatively few drivers are inebriated. So the system might bump up the speed limit for a few hours. Physical speed limit signs would be removed because your car would know where it is and what the speed limit is at any moment.

At some point it might be possible to eliminate traffic lights and stop signs in favor of having the Internet regulate all speeds as you approach intersections. The goal would be to keep all cars moving all the time but automatically adjust speeds so no cars collide. That would save a lot of gas, and lives too. Drivers would control their own speed until they approached an intersection, at which point the Internet would take control temporarily.

No one would ever get lost in this world. Over time, all cars would be retrofitted with GPS navigation. Retrofitting might be as simple as adding a dashboard screen that syncs to your smartphone. GPS navigation eliminates most wrong turns and thus saves gas.

Google’s vision of driverless cars gets us to a similar place. But human psychology might prevent adoption of driverless cars. I hope I’m wrong because that would be awesome. The halfway version, in which each driver has a much smarter car that acts like a copilot seems more likely.

Carpooling would be easier in this imagined world. You could walk to any parking lot and your smartphone would tell you who is heading to your neighborhood in the next few minutes based on past driving patterns. Your phone would start negotiating for that ride as you entered the parking lot. If the intended driver has different plans, he sees the message on his phone and declines it. Your phone goes automatically to the next driver and even shows you a map in the parking lot so you can walk right up to the correct car. You arrive just as the driver is pulling out of his spot, already expecting you because he has tracked your location. He waves you to open the door. You hop in. No words are spoken. Your smartphone and the driver’s phone record the trip distance as it happens, and transfer a preauthorized payment from the rider to the driver to compensate for gas. Video cameras in the rearview mirror keep the passenger from robbing and raping the driver, and vice versa.

Carpooling would also become more popular if each car has Internet access because it allows people to do work on the way to the office. I can imagine some progressive companies might start counting your commute time as work time as long as you have your laptop and you are not the driver. That would spread out the rush hour, reduce traffic, and save huge amounts of gas.

Hailing a cab would be convenient too. You’d always know where the nearest cab is and how long before it arrives. No one could steal your cab because the cab driver would automatically identify passengers by their phone. If the wrong person tries to climb in, the cab would sound a buzzer.

I have a theory that drunk driving could be nearly eliminated if cabs were convenient and - this next part is important - partly funded by health and auto insurance companies so the price is always reasonable. Perhaps the discount price only kicks in for people travelling to and from places that serve alcohol during certain hours of the day. That wouldn’t stop all drunk drivers, but it would put a dent in it.

Now imagine your car knows its passengers by their smartphone locations. The car’s radio could find music that matches the preferences of everyone in the car, possibly by checking each person’s iTunes or other music collections in the cloud and looking for common songs.

Now imagine all traffic accidents are recorded on the car’s video cameras and sent to the Internet in the event of a crash. That saves a huge amount of money in court cases because it will always be obvious who is at fault.

Imagine too that your car can identify in advance any cars on your road that are driving erratically or have recently come from a bar. You’d be able to keep your distance. That would help too.

There would be no more high-speed car chases in this future world. Police can stop any car’s engine via Internet. Just plug in the license plate number and it rolls to a stop.

Imagine that you never have to reach for a key as long as your phone is in your pocket and knows its location. Doors would unlock when you approach, and even the lighting, heating, and entertainment in your home, office, or car would adjust to your preferences.

To enjoy all of these services, all you need to do is trust nuns with your location information. And let’s say the nuns are not directly paid for their services. Rather, the payments from all of the industries using this common database go to the poor. It’s a win-win.

My guess is that the coming wave of location-sensing applications will be as important to the global economy as the auto industry or the computer industry. It’s a big deal, affecting every phone, computer, door, entertainment system, and auto. All we need is some visionary government leadership of the sort that helped bring us GPS satellites and the Internet. And  we need nuns to keep the government out of our location data.

Halloween Costumes

Posted October 31st, 2012 @ 1:34pm in #General Nonsense

My Halloween costume this year was Lance Armstrong. All I needed was bicycle clothes, a necklace made of hypodermic needles, and a name tag. Feel free to borrow that one.

Do you have any other good Halloween costume ideas? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

Happy Halloween!

The Software Form of Government

Posted October 29th, 2012 @ 2:09pm in #General Nonsense

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

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Most of my ideas are half-baked. This one is barely warm. But it’s fun to think about, so I thought I’d share.

Today’s thought experiment is to imagine a form of government with no employees, no elected officials, and no leaders. Imagine there are no government-owned buildings or other physical government assets either. This imaginary government exists only as software running on servers spread across multiple commercial sites, plus a bill of rights based on the American model. I’ll add one extra right: The right to affordable high-speed Internet access.

Society would agree on only three rules:


1.       New laws require a 51% majority.

2.       Changes to existing laws require a 67% majority (for stability).

3.       Votes are weighted based on test results.

That last rule means that voters must take an online test on any topic on the ballot before voting for it. A citizen’s vote would be reduced in weight according to test scores. So if you scored only 50% on a test about the national budget, your vote on budget topics would be counted as one-half.

Your first reaction to the idea of a software based government is that it would leave too many essential services unattended. You’d have rampant crime, no one picking up trash, no business rules, no environmental standards, no schools, and so on. It would be chaos.

Or would it?

Nothing has ever surprised me more than the success of Wikipedia. Before Wikipedia, how many of us would have guessed that a crowd-maintained online encyclopedia would become a global treasure? Every instinct in my body says Wikipedia should have devolved into uselessness. I would have expected pranksters to spoil Wikipedia with false information, and I would have expected knowledgeable citizens to have better things to do with their time than donate it. I would have been very wrong.

The Wikipedia model makes me think a software-based government isn’t 100% crazy. But for this system to work, one particular global trend needs to continue along its current path: Our desire for privacy has to keep shrinking. In the imaginary government-by-software, every citizen would have legal access to anyone else’s medical, financial, employment, education or any other data. We’re already seeing a rapid and voluntary disintegration of privacy. The only reason privacy exists at all is because it is often better than the alternatives. But once the alternatives to privacy become clearly superior, future generations will make rational choices to release on it. In general, every time we give up a little privacy we gain in other ways. When the benefits are large enough, privacy will seem a quaint relic from the past.

Once the public releases on its demand for privacy, crime will disappear fairly quickly. Private entities will have security cameras with facial recognition on every corner. The Internet will track the location of every automobile and every cell phone. In this future, cash will be banned in favor of electronic transactions, so the world will also know where you are by your purchases. And I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we’re all wearing location chips.

Ninety-nine percent of crime depends on being undetected long enough to escape. If you eliminate the possibility of being undetected, you eliminate most crime, and you eliminate the need for a police department. Don’t worry that the bad guys have guns because everyone else will have one too. The bad guys will always be outgunned fifty-to-one. If someone tries to become a war lord, society can cancel their credit cards and starve them into compliance. With no privacy, no gun laws, and no untraceable cash, a life of crime will be a short one.

Ideally, an information-only government will be so healthy for the economy that potential criminals will simply get legitimate jobs.

Let’s also assume that necessary functions such as education, the fire department, garbage removal, and environmental standards are all handled by organized volunteers or private companies. Everything will get done, but society will be free to attack any problem in any way it sees fit. Citizens won’t be saddled with an antique government that was designed in pre-Internet times.

Homeland defense would be a big issue for a government made entirely of software. This imaginary government still needs a professional military run by generals. But the military could be subservient to the majority opinion in the country, just as it is now for all practical purposes. Generals could simply read the opinion poll data, add their own good judgment about timing, and act accordingly. There’s no need for a civilian government to be in the middle, so long as the top generals can be fired by popular vote.

About halfway into writing this post I realized that the topic is too enormous for a blog. I’ll just summarize by saying the existence of the Internet plus the trend toward less privacy might make it possible for citizens to self-organize without the need for a formal government. I don’t predict it will happen, but the obstacles will be ones of psychology, fear of the unknown, and lack of imagination.

 

 

Machine Love

Posted October 26th, 2012 @ 2:29pm in #General Nonsense

Yesterday I needed to see something in a darkened corner of my office. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my iPhone5, held the button that summons Siri, and said, “Flashlight.”

Suddenly the corner lit up. Holy frickin’ Apple genius! Siri found my flashlight app and turned it on.

My phone and I experienced… a… moment. I swear it felt like love. Literally. There was just something so accommodating and surprising about the flashlight working exactly as I hoped it would. I use Siri often, but usually just for setting an alarm or sending a quick text message. Those situations are cool and often convenient, but they do not feel like love. I expect Siri to do voice-to-text, and I expect it to set my alarm clock on command. What I didn’t expect is that my command “Let there be light” would be obeyed. It made me feel godlike. In all seriousness, it was a rush.

I realize that this sounds like an Apple commercial, but I remind you of my history of despising most Apple products. Every Mac I’ve owned had been a lemon. My first iPhone was a total disaster. The iTunes interface is a mess that looks a Microsoft product from the nineties. My original version iPad pisses me off every day. Prior to the flashlight moment I had resisted Steve Jobs’ Rasputin-like powers of seduction that now extend beyond the grave.

I own Apple stock because it seems underpriced, but I’ve never been a fan of the products despite buying them far too often. The iPhone5 changed that. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. I am not kidding when I say I feel emotion for it. The designers and engineers at Apple have crossed some sort of psychological barrier that will someday be recognized as one of the great transitions in civilization. They literally engineered love. And by that I mean they created a device that stimulates my body chemistry in a way that feels somewhat similar to love. And I think that accomplishment will someday be seen as a bigger deal than we recognize today.

Suppose someday an industry standard is created to promote this sort of machine-generated love. The standard would simply allow anything in your environment - from your automobile to the rooms in your home - to respond to you individually, immediately, and sometimes surprisingly, the way an iPhone5 does. And perhaps the environment could be interacting with the smartphone in my pocket to make some of those actions a reality.

Suppose you had an industry standard for light bulbs and light switches that allowed any room to sense who is in it and convey that information to the electronics and other appliances in the home. Wifi-enabled light bulbs already exist, so this isn’t a stretch. Let’s say your light switch can detect motion and heat, so it knows when a room is occupied. It can also do facial recognition via its Internet connection. It knows who belongs in the house, including friends. It can pick up Bluetooth signals from phones that come near. Your phone also uses its GPS to tell the room it is near. The cloud holds my list of personal preferences, so as I move from room to room, my environment conforms to me.

The lighting adjusts to my preferences when I enter, and shuts off when I leave. If more than one person is in the room, the system intelligently negotiates priorities. For example, if one person is located in a bed, the room light will stay off when a new person enters.

My heating and cooling adjust according to who is in the house and what time it is. Even the curtains are automated.

According to my profile in the cloud, my television turns on if I am near it in my house between 9 pm and 11 pm in the evening. The screen goes to the DVR recording page and shows only the shows I liked enough to record. As I walk from room to room, the show follows me to each TV and pauses while I’m in hallways or the bathroom.

I walk to my computer and it knows who I am before I even touch it. No password needed. The screen pops to attention as I approach it.

Someone rings the doorbell and both my phone and TV present a picture of who is at the door. No cameras needed. The doorbell sensor identifies the visitor, either by facial recognition or by his phone’s signal, and his profile picture is sent to the TV and my phone. His phone and mine are automatically connected through the cloud. I just say, “Come on in, Bob. The door is unlocked.” It’s not actually unlocked until I say it. The home listens to me, understands the context, and unlocks the door electronically.

When Skype-like functions are on every television, and there’s a flat screen on every wall, all you need is your Bluetooth earpiece and the walls will seem to respond to you. Say, “Call Shelly” and the nearest TV fires up a Skype call. Whatever room Shelly is in, anywhere in the world, fires up the nearest TV screen and connects my call. If she’s walking down a public street, the street cams show on my TV, switching from one to another as she walks and talks.

My dog’s collar also has a location sensor and a speaker. I say aloud, “Where is the dog” and the house says, “The dog is in the kitchen.”

Most of what I described is unsurprising to any sci-fi fan. It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen predicted for decades. All I’m adding to the conversation is two notions:

1.       Done right, the user will feel something closer to love than simple convenience. Apple has shown that to be possible.

2.       To get to that awesome future, the world probably needs some sort of an industry standard for sensing human locations, identifying people, accessing each person’s profile in the cloud, and negotiating preferences when there is more than one person in the room. And you probably need some standards for user interfaces that are common across all devices.

This is one case in which I’d like to see an activist government organizing industry players to create such a standard. Imagine the economic growth that could happen as the world transitions from our current heartless environment to one in which every room and every device shows you love the way an iPhone5 does.

I also think this future world of machine loving will be a partial cure for loneliness. This will seem like a stretch, but hear me out. When I lost my ability to speak for over three years, I felt lonely even in a room full of people. It turns out that you can only cure loneliness by feeling heard, not by hearing others. My iPhone5 hears me and does its best to understand and respond. When my entire environment starts acting the same way, I think I’ll feel less lonely even when no other human is in the room. I’ll feel heard, even if only by a set of connected machines.

I think the future for senior citizens will be bleak until this sort of technology arrives. Every elderly person I know is severely bored and lonely. It is human nature for young people to prefer spending time with other young people and to limit their time with the old. I think it will be a huge boon to the elderly to live in a machine-love world in which their environment responds to them, and they can connect to any living person with just a verbal command.

Machine love: It’s the future.