We are facing a future of unbounded complexity.  Whether that complexity is harnessed to build a world that is safe, pleasant, humane and profitable, or whether it causes us to careen off a cliff into an abyss of mind-numbing junk is an open question. The challenges and opportunities--technical, business, and human--that this technological sea change will bring are without precedent. Entire industries will be born and others will be laid to ruin as our society navigates this journey.  There are already many more computing devices in the world than there are people.  In a few more years, their number will climb into the trillions. We put microprocessors into nearly every significant thing that we manufacture, and the cost of routine computing and storage is rapidly becoming negligible.  We have literally permeated our world with computation.  But more significant than mere numbers is the fact we are quickly figuring out how to make those processors communicate with each other, and with us. We are about to be faced, not with a trillion isolated devices, but with a trillion-node network: a network whose scale and complexity will dwarf that of today’s Internet. And, unlike the Internet, this will be a network not of computation that we use, but of computation that we live in.  Written by the leaders of one of America’s leading pervasive computing design firms, this book gives a no-holds-barred insiders’ account of both the promise and the risks of the age of Trillions. It is also a cautionary tale of the head-in-the-sand attitude with which many of today’s thought-leaders are at present approaching these issues. Trillions is a field guide to the future--designed to help businesses and their customers prepare to prosper, in the information.

Table of Contents:
Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Chapter 1 The Future, So Far 01 Trillions Is a Done Deal 02 Connectivity Will Be the Seed of Change 05 Computing Turned Inside Out 07 The Power of Digital Literacy 11 Chapter 2 The Next Mountain 15 Fungible Devices 16 Liquid Information 25 Cyberspace for Real 30 Interlude Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Platforms and User Interfaces 39 Yesterday 40 Today 41 Tomorrow 44 Chapter 3 The Tyranny of the Orthodoxy 51 Information Interruptus 52 The King and the Mathematician 60 Links to Nowhere 63 The Wrong Cloud 65 The Dream of One Big Computer 67 The Grand Repository in the Sky 68 FUD and the Birth of the Impostor Cloud 69 The Children’s Crusade 71 The Peer-to-Peer Bogey 80 Chapter 4 How Nature Does It 83 The Internet of Plants 84 Nature Has Been There Before 85 The Qualities of Beautiful Complexity 93 At the Intersection of People and Information 102 Chapter 5 How Design Does It 105 Birth of Industrial Design 107 Novelty, Beauty, Ritual, and Comfort 113 Hearing History Rhyme 114 Instability as the Status Quo 117 Post-Industrial Design 119 Interlude Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Data Storage 133 Yesterday 133 Today 136 Tomorrow 136 Chapter 6 Design Science on Trillions Mountain 139 Beyond Design Thinking to Design Science 140 Make the Right Thing 143 Chapter 7 Architecture with a Capital “A” 167 Architecture as Organic Principles 169 Architecture as Model 170 Architecture as “Style” 171 Information Architecture 173 Architecture and Design Science 178 Chapter 8 Life in an Information Ecology 181 Components 183 Challenges in the Information Ecology 188 Chapter 9 Aspects of Tomorrow 205 Beyond the Internet 206 Simplification 208 Devices 210 The Information Commons 212 The World Wide Dataflow 213 Publishing 216 Safety, Security, and Privacy 218 Epilogue Thriving in the Spacious Foothills 221 Seize the Low Ground 224 Microtransactions and the Rise of T-Commerce 225 Strange Bedfellows 226 Big Data and Information Visualization 226 The Trillions Bubble 227 Notes 231 About the Authors 245 Index 247