Silly cells

NPR had a story this morning about "polite cell phones," phones that can learn your answering habits and thereby deduce when they should and should not ring. For example, once the phone learns to recognize the sound of your boss's voice near you, it'll know not to ring at that point because you're likely to be in an important discussion. (The picture at left illustrates the point: that's me, unwisely taking a call last month while my boss was in the middle of prattling on about my lackadaisical work performance and easy distractability. The call, which ended up costing me my job, was only from a pea stuck to the bottom of the can.)

Since a cell phone would have to be very, very smart indeed to know when the incoming call is more important than whatever's going on around you, researchers have proposed that such phones give each caller (1) information about your present situation, and then (2) a choice about whether to cause the phone to ring (e.g., the caller would hear, "He's [driving to the hospital/daydreaming about unicorns/arguing with a pea] right now. Would you like to interrupt?").

The problem, immediately apparent, is just how much information does one give out, and to whom? Does just anyone get to know that I'm at Border's leafing through this month's Ferret Fancy? Or do I allow one set of information to go to my boss ("He's wowing a client right now. Would you like to interrupt?") and another to my spouse ("He's sorry about the whole 'using the cat as a floormop' thing. Could you please just let it go?")?

What's most striking about the NPR piece is this comment from a developer at Motorola:

"If I could just know if my kids are safe, or if I could just know that my wife is thinking about me, or if I could just know that my parents are OK today, that would be a really cool application that I would love to have on my cellphone."

My goodness, that's epistemological ambition, indeed! Would that we could know all of these things at all times!

Somehow I don't think a cell phone is up to the task of eliminating harm and risk from our lives, which is, at base, what the "smart cell phone" makers are trying to develop and sell to us. Until those annoying physical laws about not being able to be in more than one place at one time are repealed, we can't always know what's up with our spatially-differentiated children and spouses and parents at a given moment. Just ask Schroedinger's cat.

Maybe Motorola has some pan-dimensional, quantum superstring spacetime-phone in development, but me, I'm sticking with my two tin cans on a string. That pea might call back with a job offer.