This Does Not Mean that All Women Should Enter the Workforce

Americans are always hung over from some blow dealt them by their technological environment and are always looking for a fix—for some pleasurable escape from what technology has itself created. Complex systems in which interventions could induce large changes can be approached in a common way, no matter what the problem is. The first concept is that of an agent. An agent has the ability to interact with its environment, including other agents. An agent can respond to what happens around it and can do things more or less purposefully. Most commonly, we think of an agent as a person, such as the team member in a company or the person seeking a loan. Considering this broad definition, we can see that a person is not the only kind of agent. A family, a business, or an entire country can also be an agent. Even a computer program interacting with other programs can be regarded as an agent. When we talk about agents we will usually expect them to have a number of properties. These include location—where the agent operates; capabilities—how the agent can affect the World; and memory—what impressions the agent can carry forward from its past. The second key concept is strategy, the way an agent responds to its surroundings and pursues its goals. An employee might help a co-worker in the hope that the co-worker will reciprocate. Someone needing a small loan might ask friends to help out. A nation seeking to promote favorable norms might try to lead by example. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

A computer program seeking useful resources might buy information from other programs and keep track of which ones provided resources that were actually worth what was paid. These are all strategies. Our usage includes deliberate choice, in the sense of the term “business strategy,” but it also includes patterns of response that pursue goals with little or no deliberation. A central interest of ours is how strategies change over time. One source of change is the agent’s experience of how well the strategy is doing. An employee, finding that co-workers are not contributing to a joint project, might decide not to contribute either. Typically, human agents have some awareness of their own strategies, and they may be able to observe something about how well they are doing according to some measure of success. Often they can observe the actions or successes of the agent to try a new strategy based on trial and error, or to imitate the strategy of another agent. Changes in strategies can also come about through changes in the population of agents. For example, experienced workers may train new workers, or practices at one company may be imitated at another. Such processes of reproducing, or copying, play an important role by changing the mix of strategies or agents in the population. The idea of a population of agents is our third major concept. Indeed, the idea is so central that we sometimes refer to our framework as the “population approach to Complex Adaptive Systems.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

If you are seeking to harness complexity, populations are important in three ways: as a source of possibilities to learn from, as recipients for a newfound improvement, and as part of your environment. For example, if one is a business manager, one can learn from the population of managers who face similar problems, one can spread what is learned to a population of businesses and consumers that one adapts to even while they are adapting to you. One can think about populations of strategies as well as populations of agents. For example if you try different ways of raising funds for your nonprofit organization and observe others doing fund-raising for theirs, one can learn from the resulting population of fund-raising strategies. One of the key questions generated by our framework center on the way strategies or agents of a particular type become more (or less) common in population. For example, “aggressive” and “lowkey” might be types of sales strategies that a particular firm distinguishes. Another firm might distinguish “recurring” from “onetime.” Teachers might define the population of children at their school (agents, in our terms) as falling into types by grade levels. For other purposes, genders might be the relevant types. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Our rough criterion for the boundaries of a population will be that two agents are in the same population if one agent could employ a strategy used by another. So, for example, a villager might try an approach to borrowing money that had been effective for a family member or friend. This simple example of villagers reveals two important features of populations. First, strategies spread (and sometimes change) by moving among members of a population. A borrowing strategy might spread by word of mouth through family or friendship networks. It might also change in some significant way as it is repeatedly retold. Change processes such as this create variation among strategies. Second, populations have structure—interaction patterns that determine which pairs of agents are likely to interact and which pairs unlikely. The borrowing strategy moves among friends or relatives. Real situations often include more than just a single population of agents, of course. For one thing, there may be several different kinds of agents. There are not only sellers in the village, but also buyers. There are not only nations in the international system, but nongovernmental organizations. Moreover, many settings include important entities that are not agents. Books, vehicles, weapons, and medicines play significant roles even if they lack some qualities of agents. We will be especially interested in artifacts, objects that are used by agents. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Like agents, artifacts can have important properties, such as location or capabilities. A toy may respond to a child who winds its springs. Artifacts may have “affordances,” features that evoke certain behavior from agents, like the beautiful handle of a pitcher that invites the grasping hand. However, artifacts usually do not have purposes of their own, or powers of reproduction. When we want to talk about a real situation, we will generally pack all of these elements up into the term system. We will use the word to indicate one or more populations of agents (for example, employees and customers of the company), all the strategies of all the agents (working together to produce and sell products, and buying and using products), along with the relevant artifacts and environmental factors (manufactured products, production tools, sales brochures, and store opening hours). Here then we glimpse one of the most fundamental yet neglected relationships between knowledge and power in society: the link between how a people organize their concepts and how they organize their institutions. Put most briefly, the way we organize knowledge frequently determines the way we organize people—and vice versa. When knowledge was conceived of as specialized and hierarchical, businesses were designed to be specialized and hierarchical. Once a bureaucratic organization of knowledge finds concrete expression in real-life institutions—corporations, schools, or governments—political pressures, budgets, and other forces freeze the organization of knowledge into place, obstructing the reconceptualization that leads to radical discovery. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Today, high-speed change requires equally high-speed decisions—but power struggles make bureaucracies notoriously slow. Competition requires continual innovation—but bureaucratic power crushes creativity. The new business environment requires intuition as well as careful analysis—but bureaucracies try to eliminate intuition and replace it with mechanical, idiot-proof rules. Bureaucracy will not vanish, any more than the state will wither away. However, the environmental conditions that permitted bureaucracies to flourish—and even made them highly efficient engines—are changing so rapidly and radically, they can no longer perform the functions for which they were designed. Because of today’s business environment is convulsing with surprise, upsets, reversals, and generalized turbulence, it is impossible to know precisely and in advance who in an organization will need what information. In consequence, the information needed by both executives and workers to do their jobs well, let alone to innovate and improve the work, cannot reach the front-line managers and employees through the old official channels. This explains why millions of intelligent, hardworking employees find they cannot carry out their tasks—they cannot open new markets, create new products, design better technology, treat customers better, or increase profits—except by going around the rules, breaking with formal procedures How many employees today need to close their eyes to violations of formal procedure to get things done? To be a doer, a fixer, a red-tape cutter, a go-getter, they must trash the bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Thus, information begins to spill out of the formal channels into all those informal networks, gossip systems, and grapevines that bureaucracies seek to suppress. Simultaneously, corporations spend billions to construct electronic alternatives to the old communication structures. However, all these require enormous changes in the actual organization, the way people are ranked and grouped. For all these reasons the years ahead will see a tsunami of business restructuring that will make the recent wave of corporate shake-ups look like a placid ripple. Specialists and managers alike will see their entrenched power threatened as they lose control of their cubbyholes and channels. Power shifts will reverberate throughout companies and whole industries. For when we change the relations between knowledge and production, we shake the very foundations of economic and political life. That is why we are on the edge of the greatest shift of power in business history. And the first signs of it are already evident in the new-style organizations fast springing up around us. We can call them the “flex-firms” of the future. Sergio Rossi was a business hero. He was not some strutting bureaucrat or tycoon ensconced in a glass-sheathed skyscraper. He worked, instead, from his home in the Val Vibrata, in eastern Italy, with three employees who use high-tech machines to turn out fine-quality purses and pocketbooks for sale in New York City department stores. He founded his own brand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

Not so far away one finds Mario D’Eustachio, who heads up Euroflex, a 200-employee firm that makes luggage for Macy’s. Euroflex is a collaborative effort. Pia D’Eustachio, Mr. E’s wife, is in charge of sales; Tito, a son, guards the finances; Tiziana, a daughter, designs the luggage; and a nephew, Paolo, runs the production side of things. These are only 2 of the 1,650 small firms in the valley, each averaging only 15 workers, but collectively turning out over $1 billion a year in clothing, leatherware, and furniture. And Val Vibrata is only one small region—part of what is now known as the Third Italy. Italy Numero Uno was the agricultural South. Italy Numero Due was the industrial North. Italy Numero Tre is composed of rural and semirual regions, like Val Vibrata, using high-tech and small, usually family-based enterprise to contribute to what has been called the “Italian miracle.” A similar pattern is seen in smaller cities. Modena, for example, boasts 16,000 jobs in the knitwear industry. Whereas the number f workers in firms employing more than 50 has plummeted since 1971, employment in firms with 5 or fewer workers rose. Most of these are family-run. The virtues of family business are being discovered elsewhere too. In the United States of America, after years of being considered small-time, family businesses are hot. Francois M. de Visscher, of the financial firm Smith Barney, says he wants his company to become “the premier investment banker to family businesses,” and everyone from management consultants to marriage counselors are gearing up to sell services to what might be called “the fam-firm sector.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

The smallest of these family firms are short on titles and formality; larger ones combine informality among family members at the top with formality and bureaucratic organization below. It is glib to suggest that small is always beautiful or that an advanced economy can function without very large enterprises, especially as the global economy grows more integrated. Italian economists, for example, worry that Italy’s dynamic small firms may not cut the mustard in an integrated European market, and the European Community, long an advocate of bigness, favors large-scale mergers and urges small firms to form alliances and consortia. However, while consortia may make sense, the EC’s infatuation with superscale may prove shortsighted—a failure to recognize the imperatives of the super-symbolic economy. Thus, there is mounting evidence that giant firms, backbone of the smokestack economy, are too slow and maladaptive for today’s high-speed business World. Not only has small business provided most of the 20 million jobs added to the U.S.A economy since 1977, it has provided most of the innovation. Worse yet, the giants are increasingly lackluster as far as profits go. The biggest companies are the most profitable—on the basis of return on equity—in only 4 out of 67 industries. Well over half the time the biggest corporate player fails to attain even the industry average return on invested capital. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

In many fields the savings that sheer size once made possible are fading as new technologies make customization cheap, inventories small, and capital requirements low. Most of the classical justifications of large size have proved to be of minimal value, or counterproductive, or fallacious. Small firms now can gain access to huge amounts of capital from Wall Street. They have ready access to information. And it is easier for them to use it, since they tend to be less bureaucratic. Conversely, the “diseconomies of scale” are catching up with many of the bloated giants. It is clear, moreover, that in the economy of tomorrow huge firms will become more dependent than in the past on a vast substructure of tiny but high-powered and flexible suppliers. And many of these will be family-run. Today’s resurrection of small business and the family firm brings with it an ideology, an ethic, and an information system that is profoundly antibureaucratic. In a family, everything is understood. By contrast, bureaucracy is based on the premise that nothing is understood. (Hence the need for everything to be spelled out in an operational manual and for employees to work “by the book.”) The more things are understood, the less has to be verbalized or communicated by memo. The more shared knowledge or information, the fewer the cubbyholes and channels needed in an organization. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

In a bureaucratic company, position and pay are ostensibly determined by “what you know,” as though “who you know” did not matter. Yet the reality is that “who you know” is important, and grows in importance as one moves up in the World. Who you know determines access to crucial knowledge—namely, information about who owes whom a favor, and who is to be trusted (which, in turn, means whose information is reliable.) In a family firm nobody kids anymore. Too much is known by all about all, and helping a son or daughter succeed by using “pull” is natural. In the bureaucratic firm, pull is called nepotism and is seen as violation of the merit system that purportedly prevails. In a family, subjectivity, intuition, and passion govern both love and conflict. In a bureaucracy, decisions are supposed to be impersonal and objective, although, as we have seen, it is internecine power struggles that determine important decisions, rather than the cool clear rationality described in textbooks. Finally, in a bureaucracy it is often difficult to know who has power, despite for formal hierarchy and titles. In the family enterprise, everyone knows that titles and formality do not count. Power is held by the patriarch or, occasionally, the matriarch. And when he or she passes from the scene, it is usually conferred on a hand-picked relative. In short, wherever family relationships play a part in business, bureaucratic values and rules are subverted, and with them the power structure of the bureaucracy as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

This is important, because today’s resurgence of family business is not just a passing phenomenon. We are entering a “post-bureaucratic” era, in which the family firm is only one of many alternatives to bureaucracy and the power it embodies. Now, when focusing on Japan, for its economy to advance in a period of rapid, often confusing and complex change, it will also have to loosen its rigid role structure—not merely in the professions and the workplace generally but at the deeper level of family life and gender. Old assumptions about marriage and family—and their relationship to the economy—are falling away. In 1972, according to a white paper issued by Japan’s Cabinet Office, 80 percent of Japanese men and women agreed that only men should hold jobs. Wives should be full-time homemarkers. By 2022, 45 percent of men, and 55 percent of women no longer agreed with that division of labor. Young women are marrying later and attach less stigma to staying single. A postwar low of 514,000 marriages were registered in Japan in 2021, while around 50 percent of women and 70 percent of men in their 20s have never married. Today’s more assertive unmarried women refuse to be classified as “Christmas Cakes,” a disparaging term that compares them to leftovers tossed in the garbage bin the day after the holiday. Those who do marry are having fewer babies. The national birthrate for Japan in 2022 is 7.109 births per 1,000 people, a 1.33 percent decline from 2021. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Thus, while promotional opportunities for women are better in I.T. and Internet-related companies. In 2018, women account for 14.9 percent of management staff in Japan, which is up from 9.9 percent in 2003. That is compared to nearly 40 percent of all managers being women in the United States of America. And women’s earned income in Japan was still only 46 percent of males. Meanwhile, the government, hoping to stem the decline in the birthrate, has called on business to offer paternity leave to fathers, hoping they would help their wives and bond with their newborns. So few men, however, have taken advantage of this that the city of Ota decided sterner, more creative (and procreative) measures were needed. In 2004, it ruled that all males working for the city would henceforth be compelled to take forty days off in the year after a birth, to keep notes and to report back on what they had learned from the experience. The idea, said one city official, was to “get men involved in raising children” and to counteract the notion that doing so was effeminate. Ota proves that even a city hall can, on occasion, think outside the proverbial box. Or that, faced with these birth numbers, Japan’s leaders are desperate. However, are they desperate enough? #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

This does not mean that all women should enter the workforce. Caring for children and managing a home are critical prosumer functions that, as we have seen, create economic value and keep the money economy alive. However, the old division of labor based on gender is another structural rigidity standing in the way of Japan’s economic advance toward revolutionary wealth. In today’s Worldwide race to create knowledge-based money economies, Japan, once a leader, is using only half of its available brainpower. And that is not smart. Speaking of smart, do athletes ever have a “hot hand”? Sometimes it seems that Steph Curry cannot miss a basket, or Alex Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby a shot or a goal. Sports announcers see these long streaks of consecutive successes and proclaim that the athlete has a “hot hand.” Yet according to psychology professors Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, this is a misperception of reality. They point out that if you flip a coin long enough, you will find some very long series of consecutive heads. The psychologists suspect that sports commentators, short on insightful things to say, are just finding patterns in what amounts to a long series of coin tosses over a long playing season. They propose a more rigorous test. In basketball, they look at all the instances of a player’s baskets, and observe the percentage of times that player’s next shot is also a basket. A similar calculation is made for the shots immediately following misses. If a basket is more likely to follow a basket than to follow a miss, then there really is something to the theory of the hot hand. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

They conducted this test on the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. The results contradicted the “hot hand” view. When a player made his last shot, he was less likely to make his next; when he missed his previous attempt, he was more likely to make his next. This was true even for Andrew Toney, a player with the reputation for being a streak shooter. Does this mean we should be talking about the “stroboscopic hand,” like the strobe light that alternates between on and off? Game theory suggests a different interpretation. While the statistical evidence denies the presence of streak shooting, it does not refute the possibility that a “hot” player might warm up the game in some other way. The difference between streak shooting and a hot hand arises because of the interaction between the offensive and the defensive strategies. Supposed Andrew Toney does have a truly hot hand. Surely the other side would start to crowd him. This could easily lower his shooting percentage. That is not all. When the defense focuses on Toney, one of his teammates is left unguarded and is more likely to shoot successfully. In other words, Toney’s hot hand leads to an improvement in the 76ers’ team performance, although there may be a deterioration in Toney’s individual performance. Thus we might test for hot hands by looking for streaks in team success. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

Similar phenomena are observed in many other team sports. A brilliant running-back on a football team improves its passing game and a great pass-receiver helps the running game, as the opposition is forced to allocate more of its defensive resources to guard the starts. In the 1986 soccer World Cup final, the Argentine star Diego Maradona did not score a goal, but his passes through a ring of West German defenders led to two Argentine goals. The value of a star cannot be assessed by looking only at one’s scoring performance; one’s contribution to one’s teammates’ performance is crucial, and assist statistics help measure this contribution. In ice hockey, assists and goals are given equal weight for ranking individual performance. A player may even assist oneself when one hot hand warms up the other. The Oakland Warriors star Steph Curry, is great a shooting 3 pointers, even though he is under pressure all the time. 2-point shots tend to be easier, but Curry can put the ball on the floor and create his own shot from anywhere on the floor and he does not need much space to get his own shot off. We know even when a 2-point shot is stronger, it may even be used less often because a player may be in for maximum points. Many of you will have experienced this unusual phenomenon when playing tennis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

If your backhand is much weaker than your forehand, your opponents will learn to play to your backhand. Eventually, as a result of all this backhand practice, your backhand will improve. As your two stokes become more equal, opponents can no longer exploit your weak backhand. They will play more evenly between forehands and backhands. You get to use your better forehand more often; this could be the real advantage of improving your backhand. Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomanic redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B.F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology. I think it justifiable to say that, in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture. In the twenty first century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers, but can come from sports and players. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Nevertheless, think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erickson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B.F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists. I do not mean, incidentally, that the metaphors of social research are created in the same way as those of novels and plays. The writer of fiction creates metaphors by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus. The researcher tends to do it the other way around. The focus is on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion. Also, the novelist proceeds by showing. The researcher, using abstract social facts, proceeds by reason, by logic, by argument. That is why fiction is apt to be more entertaining. Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh shows us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorsten Veblen argues them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulbreg shows us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has tried to explain through sociological analysis. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. However, the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our times, apparently more credible. In the new there is always an admixture of the antiquated, especially where technology is considered. Surfaces surround us, and human-made surfaces—walls, roofs, and pavement—cover huge areas that matter to people. How can smart materials make a difference here? The revolution in technology has come and gone, and you want to repaint your walls. Breathing toxic solvents and polluting water by washing brushes have passed into history, because paint has been replaced with smarter stuff. The mid-twentieth century had seen considerable progress in paints, especially the development f liquids that were not quite liquid—they would spread with a brush, but did not (stupidly) run and drip under their own weight. This was an improvement, but the new material, “paperpaint,” is even more cooperative. Paperpaint comes in a box with a special trowel and pen. The paperpaint itself is a dry block that feels a lot like a block of wood. Following the instructions, you use the pen to draw a line around the edge of the area you want to paint, putting an X in the middle to show where you want the paint to go on; the line is made of nontoxic disappearing ink, so you can slop it around without staining anything. Using the towel, you slice off a hunk of paperpaint—which is easy, because it parts like soft butter to the trowel even though it behaves like a solid to everything else. Very high IQ stuff, that. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Next, you press the hunk against the X and start smoothing it out with the towel. Each stroke spreads a wide swath of paperpaint, much wider than the trowel, but always staying within the inked line. A few swipes spreads it precisely to the edges, whereupon it smooths out into a uniform layer. Why does it not just spread itself? Experience showed that customers did not min the effort of making a few swipes and preferred the added control. The paperpaint consists of a huge number of nanomachines with little wheels for rolling over one another and little sticky pads for clinging to surfaces. Each has a simple, stupid computer on board. Each can signal its neighbors. The whole mass of them clings together like an ordinary solid, but they can slip and slide in a controlled way when signaled. When you smooth the trowel over them, this contact tells them to get moving and spread out. When they hit the line, this tells them to stop. If they do not hit a line, they go a few handbreadths, then stop anyway until your trowel them again. When they encounter a line on all sides, word gets around, and they jostle around to form a smooth, uniform layer. Any that get scraped off are just so much loose dusts, but they stick together quite well. This paint-stuff does not get anything wet, does not stain, and clings to surfaces just tightly enough to keep it from peeling off accidentally. If some experimentally minded child starts digging with a stick, makes a tear, and peels some off, it can be smoothed back again and will rejoin as good as new. The child may eat a piece, but careful regulation and testing has ensured that this is no worse than eating plain paper, and safer than eating a colorful Sunday newspaper page. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Many refinements are possible. Swipes and pats of the trowel could make areas thicken or thin, or bridge small holes (no more Spackling!). With sufficiently smart paperpaint, and some way to indicate what it should do, you can have your choice of textures. Any good design will be washable, and a better design would shed dirt automatically using microscopic brushes. Removal, of course, is easy; either you rip and peel (no scrapping needed), or find that trowel, set the dial on to handle to “Strip,” and poke the surface a few times. Either way, you end up with a lump ready to pitch into the recycling bin the same old wall you started with, bared to sight again. Perhaps no product will ever be made exactly like the smart paint just described. It would be disappointing if something better could not be made by the time smart paint is technologically possible. Still, paperpaint gives a feel for some of the features to expect in the new smart products, features such as increased flexibility and better control. Without loading yet more capability into our paint (though there is no reason why one could not), soon you may even be able to use your very walls to, say, turn on the stove or dim the lights. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Disney Research have collaborated to design a conductive paint that, when applied to any wall, makes the surface interactive. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Many people like to knock down walls, but why not make them make more sense? The smart walls function like giant touchscreens and have the potential to respond to gesture commands. They can track users’ positions in the room and know which electrical appliances are close by and whether they are being used. The researchers used special conductive paint containing nickel, applied in grid, to create electrodes on the wall. This paint turns the wall into a touchscreen and an electromagnetic sensor. They then painted over the electrodes with regular paint. The walls look and feel totally ordinary. That is one of the major benefits. We imagine a future where every Cresleigh Homes comes equipped with similar smart walls, which home owners can feel free to use or simply ignore. This could mean that people may prefer to go back to traditional homes, with formal rooms, not just one big casual space. Another benefit of using paint to create the smart surface is cost. The team currently estimates the application costs at about $20 per square meter, but hope to bring the price down with further fine tuning. The walls could potentially serve as an interface for controlling home appliances that would be less expensive, more efficient and less obtrusive than current smart home setups. People purchase smart appliances that can easily cost thousands of dollars, or one could buy after market sensors that people can tag to everyday objects. However, one does not want one’s beautiful kitchen to be tagged with all these sensors. And batteries have to be recharged. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

The walls target the needs and preferences of different residents, identified perhaps by their smart watches. It could turn on the lights just the way you like, play your roommates favorite tunes when one walks into the room, notify family members if baby appears to have fallen. Besides reducing the cost of the paint, walls will be capable of detecting appliances at further distances. Right now the walls have a range of 3 meters, which is fine for wall-mounted TVs or a lamp that sits by the couch. However, they hope to expand the range to 10 or even 20 meters, making the walls capable of sensing electronics in the middle of very large rooms. This product may be commercially available in less than five years. One could walk into Home Dept or Ace Hardware and buy this paint. This is what we want in our future technology in terms of being really invisible and embedded and camouflaged and subtle. Victorian homes were haunted by spirits, our homes will be haunted by technology. The future of smart home technology will blend seamlessly into our homes. We might, for example, have systems that subtly nudge us towards sleep by diming the lights or spraying calming whiffs of lavender. Smart mattresses could monitory our sleep phases and adjust the environment to keep us comfortable. We want simple control features, which will allow people to control smart walls by gestures, so users do not spend weeks trying to figure out how to interact with the technology. This will make people feel like they have superpowers. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23