Adam’s on a book tour, for his book, Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

You can forgive him that as soon as he starts to speak, and because the book’s been around a while. He is engaging and clear about the things he has seen happening and how they extrapolate into a future where the floor you walk on knows who you are. Think Minority Report.

With images of Bentham’s Panopticon prison, the Tokyo subway system and many other insightful observations he convinces us that ubiquitous computing is happening now, all around us. Maybe we’d like to think about the design of that? The social implications; what happens to a society if every last stitch of hypocrisy is removed and everyone can know where anyone else is, or was, at any given time.

He talks about the need for plausible deniability in society, not in away to protect the seedier sides of life, but simply because as humans we need privacy.

To protect us from ourselves, or more likely each other, he suggests 5 laws for ubiquitous computing in a style reminiscent of Aasimov’s 3 laws of robotics. Given his next example, though – that you can’t walk from one place in Manhattan to another without being surveilled by CCTV – it may be harder than we would like to keep to these laws.

A few months ago I signed up for Garlik, and their CEO Tom Ilube recently podcasted with Paul Miller. The amount of information that Garlik found about me online was somewhat troubling, but the benefits of my Flickr account, my blog and online communities such as code4lib simply outweigh the risk; for now.

With networked computers, sensors, cameras and our own personal GPS, phone and other devices being increasingly omnipresent Adam discusses the subject objectively, but certainly not dispassionately.

Now I just have to read the book.