Busi­ness Week has run an enthu­si­as­tic arti­cle tout­ing the com­ing age of Dig­i­tal Con­ver­gence. In a slash­dot com­ment on the thing, the old “your fridge will know when you need to order milk” trope is trot­ted out.

That’s a short-​​sighted idea that I’ve slapped around in pub­lic before, but I just real­ized that it was back before Notional Slurry when I was giv­ing work­shops and sem­i­nars and tuto­ri­als at OOPSLA and ASA/​MA and other con­fer­ences. So I thought, since I was reminded, I’d pass along what I tell my audi­ences and customers.

If you don’t know it, the “fridge orders your milk” trope most often crops up in con­ver­sa­tions regard­ing autonomous soft­ware agents and agent-​​based design. The story goes some­thing like, “In the future, every elec­tronic device (a) will be net­worked, and (b) will be con­trolled by an autonomous agent-​​based soft­ware sys­tem that com­mu­ni­cates through the ubiq­ui­tous net­work to other agents. So your agent-​​based fridge will, for exam­ple, read the bar­code on the milk when it gets put in, and keep track of when it is about to expire, and will either remind you to buy more or will order it for you.”

Strangely enough, my gripe is not that I don’t believe it. Indeed, I expect it will be lit­er­ally true in the near future — if only because every short-​​sighted gurulette has heard it and passed it on to Mar­ket­ing a dozen times at over the last decade. If you can’t buy a modem equipped or Blue­tooth milk-​​aware fridge from Hammacher-​​Schlemmer in the next cou­ple of years, I’ll make you eat your hat.

But, if I may say so, it’s the most irre­deemably bor­ing vision of the future I’ve heard for sev­eral decades. My fridge will order my milk? Thou­sands of man-​​hours of research and thought by dili­gent cre­ative grad stu­dents and tech­ni­cians and a few pro­fes­sors leads to the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of the fuck­ing shop­ping list indus­try? What hap­pens to all the innu­mer­able real advances in multi-​​agent sys­tems, smart mate­ri­als, affec­tive com­put­ing, and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing? We for­get them, like the peo­ple in the Star Trek uni­verse all for­got how to use an auto­matic pilot or a com­puter tar­get­ing system?

You want to know when agent-​​based design is here? Not when my fridge reads bar­codes. No, it goes like this:

My milk will sense it’s not feel­ing well, and will chat with the fridge and maybe ask it have a look-​​see with its extra senses and bring its extra smarts to bear, or ask some friends. Together they con­coct a plan to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion. Maybe they do some chem­istry. Maybe they develop some anti­bod­ies. Maybe they try to talk the bac­te­ria out of their harsh­ness, con­vert to a nice com­mu­nal yoghurt and seek a per­ma­nent exis­tence as a col­lec­tive, nur­tured and sup­ported by the shel­ter­ing fridge. The least they can do is see it off to a noble end, with a lit­tle dig­nity, and make arrange­ments to take care of its progeny.

Agent-​​based engi­neer­ing and design won’t really be here, except as a wannabe imma­ture field or a suite of design pat­terns, until some­thing like that comes to pass. And if you really attend to how the research is going and how we can make things hap­pen already, this one is just as inevitable as the fridge scenario.

Screw the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing, the intro­duc­tion of dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies to elec­tron­ics con­sumers, and the enabling of net­worked hard­ware for ubiq­ui­tous seam­less e-​​commerce.

No, I’ll be sat­is­fied with noth­ing less than the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of design itself, and the empow­er­ment of stuff.