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A Day in the (Future) Life

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000

The section front on home networking of a couple of weeks ago has drawn lots of mail and I'll get to it in a mailbag column later this month. First, however, it also got my brain cooking (the smoke coming out of my ears was the first sign my family had to go and lie up somewhere out of range). The result? A day in the life of a typical GTA family, say about 5 to 10 years from now...

Home, home on the Net...

Harry and Petra Samuels and their two children, Robin and Sparrow, live in Richmond Hill, Ontario, on the north edge of the Greater Toronto Area. Harry works from home as a commercial software consultant. Petra works downtown as a public relations consultant. Both have degrees from the University of Toronto (where they met) and they're both in their late 30's.

Robin is 12; Sparrow is 10 and both split their school time between home and the old bricks-and-mortar edifice that would be familiar to their grandparents. They go to school two days a week to take courses requiring equipment they don't have at home. The other three days are spent at home, taking courses and interacting with their teachers over the Internet.

This is a moderately affluent family by the standards of the day. Between them, Harry and Petra make about $150,000 annually. And, although it sounds like a fair chunk of change, it's just enough for the family to live well, but not extravagantly. Wages have crept upwards, but other costs have, too well. Gasoline, for example, is $1.50 per litre and the farm lobby has finally had some effect in driving food costs up (although, strangely, farmers aren't more affluent, but the heads of major distribution companies seem to be driving bigger cars, so perhaps nothing much has really changed). Fortunately for Harry and Petra, they're saving energy costs by driving one of the new hydrogen fuel cell cars, although rumours have it that the cost of sugar is about to go through the roof.

One of the other large monthly costs for the couple, aside from housing, food, and energy, is something that has become part of everyone's home and business budget: communications. There's a monthly charge for their basic access to the Net, another for each piece of e-mail they send or receive, and more for the subscriptions they have to various software services that once came in a box and resided on their hard drives (no, really!).
The telephone companies have finally found a way to charge for Internet phone calls, and other communications / entertainment services are all on a per-item, per minute billing basis. The couple's communications budget eats up about a quarter of their monthly expenses.

On any given day, the family members are awakened by the House Manager and how it does that varies for each one. Sparrow prefers the new heavy fugue-rock to make his blood start moving; Robin uses the voice of the current teen idol. Petra is one of those annoying people who appears able to go to bed early and to "will" herself to awaken at any time...and to make it worse on poor Harry, she's bouncy, too.

Harry has tried any number of schemes, from the voice of his old highschool gym teacher, to that of his mother and any number of musical options. This month, he has the House Manager use an air-horn. Harry isn't a morning guy and Petra makes fun of him with a T-Shirt that reads, "Some Mornings I Wake up Grumpy. Others, I just let him sleep."

It's Harry's job to get the kids ready for "school" and this morning is no exception. As he enters the kitchen, the screen on the refrigerator notifies him that they're low on milk, eggs, orange-juice...and a long list of other consumables: some from the fridge, some from the "smart" pantry, others from the various bathroom medicine and cleaning supply cabinets. The fridge has been in contact with the store and has a total ready. The only reason it asks him for permission to proceed is that the list of items is particularly long this week, with a few high-cost staples, and the total exceeds the House Manager's budget forecast. Harry overrides the hold and the order is sent (and it will be delivered later in the day — one of Harry's choices is to tell the fridge he won't be home; otherwise it simply schedules the delivery after checking his calendar with the House Manager).

Petra is leaving a little early for work this morning. Her car has been monitoring city traffic reports and advised the House Manager to tell her there would be an extra ten-minute delay because of construction on the Parkway (some things indeed do not change). She and Harry will talk at least once during the day, using their Internet-based video-phone setup and she reminds him she wants to show him a new dress after lunch (yes, they'd both seen it on the Net last night, but Harry's a bit old-fashioned — he likes to see the dresses on Petra before he decides whether or not he likes them. And Petra, for her part, likes to show him, too).

A moment to describe the Samuels' home. It's a four-bedroom side-split on a modestly wooded lot with a two-car plus workshop garage. The basement is fully finished as a family room and contains an extra bedroom that Robin has claimed.

Although the Samuels' didn't have the house built, it is of fairly recent design and was fully wired for connectivity before they moved in. The main server (the House Manager) has its own room in the basement, together with the various routers, hubs, and gateways used by the other appliances to communicate with the family, with each other, and with the outside world. The connectivity includes hard-wired, high-speed cables for desktop workstations, wireless access for Petra's notebook, "Bluetooth" interface for the family's digital cell phones (each of them has one), and "HomePlug" interfaces for everything else to communicate using standard house wiring.

Through vocal communication with the House Manager, the family members can control everything in the house that plugs in. Some of the services, such as the family's financial records, the security system settings, and the environmental settings (temperature, humidity, and so on) can only be accessed by Harry and Petra. As the kids get older, they may extend some of these services to respond to them as well. But both Robin and Sparrow can access certain television channels (not all of them), the house lighting, their computers, and of course, the "panic button" to alert emergency services that they need help.

School still starts at 8:30 sharp, so both Robin and Sparrow are in front of their terminals, logging in. The terminals not only have their voice prints, but also their retinal scans, and small sensors know when the kids are present. Although learning from home is more comfortable than the old classrooms, it's a lot harder to play hooky.

During a typical day, the kids will have access to more information than their grandparents could imagine. Today, for example, Robin's class is taking a virtual tour of the Guggenheim Museum, while Sparrow's class is holding a live conversation with a group of Canadian researchers doing under-ice exploration in the Beaufort Sea. Later in the afternoon, their whole "school" is participating in a competition with schools elsewhere in Canada, the US, and England where they've researched national economies and have prepared a computer-driven model of the global financial network. Their goal is to cooperate with their counterparts to see who can add the most to the global economy. Neither Harry nor Petra understands precisely what they're up to, but they do know (because the House Manager has alerted them) that Sparrow's use of the Internet has skyrocketed over the past couple of weeks.

The parents don't worry about how much the kids use the Net; although offensive Web sites still exist, real-time censors prevent the kids from visiting them.

While the kids are online, Harry is, too. So is the House Manager. In fact the whole house is connected to the Internet in such a way that Petra can run it from where she works if there's some reason to do so. But anyone and everyone in the house can be online at anytime.

Evening is time for family activity. The Samuels have arranged their working life so that work gets done in the daytime. Because the kids do their schoolwork online, they have no homework, but because of over a decade of government cutbacks, they have to find those things that were once extracurricular activities on their own.
The family participates in a full range of outside activities. The kids both have music lessons. Sparrow is into a full range of sports and Robin looks as though she may reach competitive levels in diving.

Tonight, however, the weather is nasty; the kids have the night off, and their parents have no volunteer events on the schedule. Although they could pipe any television program or movie ever made to any room in the house (and all could be different), they get together in the family room for a group experience with the latest Hollywood blockbuster — portrayed digitally on their wide-screen, 64-inch home theatre TV. Of course it also has the obligatory set-top box for the user's choice of interactive video gaming, Internet Surfing, DVD playback or broadcast digital television.

At 10:00, the House Manager reminds Robin and Sparrow that it's time for bed. It will also nag Harry and Petra if it doesn't sense them moving to their bedroom by midnight.

Just another night in suburbia.

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