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| PHONING THE FUTURE | |
 August 30, 1999 
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The capabilities of the common household phone have expanded exponentially, with further advancement expected to come rapidly in the decades to come. Paul Solman reports on the phone of the future.
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SPOKESMAN: First, there's an intercontinental business conference; a touch of a button, and picture phones bring the conferees together. Even printed material is exchanged among the group by telephonic machine. PAUL SOLMAN: A vision of the telephone's future as of today from M.I.T. MICHAEL COEN: Welcome to the Intelligent Room. Please come in. PAUL SOLMAN: Researchers like Michael Coen are creating their version of the future as we speak. Instead of using a traditional telephone or typing into a computer, say, here at M.I.T.'s so-called "Intelligent Room" you're surrounded by technology that hangs on your every word. MICHAEL COEN: And what you'll notice is the camera on the coffee table in front of us is going to turn to look at me. So if I was teleconferencing with somebody, they'd be able to see me on the television as soon as I sat down in here. |
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| A multiple of telecom choices | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MICHAEL COEN: Tell me about Baghdad. PAUL SOLMAN: There's Baghdad. MICHAEL COEN: Zoom out. PAUL SOLMAN: Funded by the Pentagon to literally think outside the box, Coen is mixing TV, the telephone, the Internet and more to create a total information environment. MICHAEL COEN: Computer. COMPUTER: I'm already listening. What's your question? MICHAEL COEN: Does Iraq have ballistic missiles? COMPUTER: Does Iraq have ballistic missiles? MICHAEL COEN: And the room will display the answer. PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, my goodness! These are the systems? These are actual missiles?
PAUL SOLMAN: The names of Iraqi missiles. MICHAEL COEN: Yes. PAUL SOLMAN: Now for high tech visionaries, the whole point is to invent
the future -- and let someone else worry about the mess. But for many
of us low-tech mortals |
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| An expanding industry | ||||||||||||||||||||
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PAUL SOLMAN: A special bane these days is cell phones. With so many plans you could easily sign up for the wrong one -- and seem like an idiot -- or that's how the number two executive at Bell Atlantic made me feel when I complained about my long-term contract with its costly calls. PAUL SOLMAN: You're right. I didn't buy a bundle of minutes. I just have the service itself. JIM CULLEN: Okay. PAUL SOLMAN: That's my mistake? JIM CULLEN: What do you do with the phone if you don't buy minutes? What are you doing with it, decoration? PAUL SOLMAN: Well, -- JIM CULLEN: Paul, you have a basic problem as a consumer here. ANNOUNCER: Introducing AT&T's Personal Network. PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, Bell Atlantic's chief cell phone rival in the Northeast, good old AT&T, has its siren song. COMPUTER: White's residence. Barry speaking. Talk to me baby.
DAN SOMERS: Simply, $89.99 A month, $99.99 A month, $119 you get a phone, you buy a bucket of minutes, you don't pay roaming charges. PAUL SOLMAN: This is the personal network? DAN SOMERS: No, this is Digital One rate. PAUL SOLMAN: See, I'm already confused. |
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| The future arrives | ||||||||||||||||||||
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SONG: In a place where electronic wonders abound; A marriage of sight to a drama of sound; A wonderful coupling of vision and speech; And a ride to the future and the past within reach. PAUL SOLMAN: The point is, today's technology has been in the cards for decades. SPOKESPERSON: Someday people may want to see as well as talk over the telephone. What we are doing here is trying out one model of a picture phone. PAUL SOLMAN: 35 years later... DAVID NAGEL, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: There you are. How are you? PAUL SOLMAN: Fine. How are you? The image is jerky, the handset vestigial, but it will be better and another option for us consumers within a few years from AT&T via a TV cable.
DAVID NAGEL: That's right. We're using the TV receiver as just a cheap and ubiquitous-- everyone has them-- display device. PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, for some, this means more to think about. Am I going to have to make up, as I do for an interview on the NewsHour, where I have to hide my hot spots on my bald head? DAVID NAGEL: Well, it doesn't look so bad on this end. PAUL SOLMAN: That is tremendous relief. DAVID NAGEL: People will develop-- I believe, over time-- an etiquette for how they do it. Some people may turn their cameras off. Some people will just adapt to it in other ways. But, you know, people did the same thing with telephone. I remember as a child, my mother had a very different voice on the telephone than she did in person. PAUL SOLMAN: And if I move to do something untelegenic, I can just block the camera or turn it away or something. PAUL SOLMAN: Okay, we'll adjust to video phones. And it sure will be nice to see the grandkids when you talk to them. But what about all the other innovations already sketched by AT&T back in the 60's? |
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| The telecom highway | ||||||||||||||||||||
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PAUL SOLMAN: Well, today with the huge so- called broad band capacity that TV cable provides, such visions are just around the corner. The good news: Movies whenever you want them to manipulate as you please. The bad news: More choices you may not want at all. On the other hand, for you NewsHour junkies... JAY WILPON, Researcher, AT&T Labs: So let's say you've got this now big cable, big broad band piped in your house. One of the things you might want to be able to do is to look through, let's say, past stories of the "MacNeil/Lehrer Report." PAUL SOLMAN: No, it's actually "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" now. JAY WILPON: I'm sorry. I'm showing my age. So what we actually do in there is have a speech recognizer in there that actually listens to all of "The NewsHour" reports that we had over time, and I can actually... PAUL SOLMAN: Boy. JAY WILPON: And you can have a favorite word or something that we might want to look for. PAUL SOLMAN: Try the word kooky, k-o-o-k-y. JAY WILPON: And we can search for all the programs in "The NewsHour" and there is one. PAUL SOLMAN: Yeah. Then that could be the right one. You did a piece on alternative medicine JAY WILPON: Is that the piece? PAUL SOLMAN: Yeah, because you can see this woman has got her cap on in the operating room and she's actually transferring her energy to the blood of a heart patient who's having surgery. JAY WILPON: I'm glad I'm not on that... So let's see if that's in fact it. PAUL SOLMAN: Okay. Now wait a second. So now up... there's the woman and she's blessing the blood. PAUL SOLMAN: (to woman) Do you understand that it looks almost kooky for you to be doing that? WOMAN: (answering) I guess it does. PAUL SOLMAN: Very good. Wow.
PAUL SOLMAN: At rival Bell Atlantic, meanwhile, they thought we were kooky to fall for cable, when their plain old copper wires, supped up and connected to the Internet, should suffice. JEFF WALDHUTER: With our system there will be unlimited content. Anybody could become a provider of entertainment in the future by upgrading their server. PAUL SOLMAN: And so what happens is, this copper wire that suddenly can get me to the Internet really fast, will then gain me access to their servers as long as they upgraded the big computers to do exactly what I was doing with AT&T except through the Internet. JEFF WALDHUTER: Right. PAUL SOLMAN: In other words, another choice. Not just between TV cable and supped up phone wires, but between content providers. AT&T will use its own huge computers to feed all sorts of stuff over its cable, including things that are still on the drawing board. |
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| Overwhelming the consumer | ||||||||||||||||||||
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PAUL SOLMAN: By contrast, Bell Atlantic's strategy is to let others worry about the content. Firms like Disney, Sony, PBS, will store TV programs, movies and the like, on their giant computers. Bell Atlantic will simply connect you to them via the Internet. Is that better than a cable TV hookup? Who knows. Let's just hope they all pity the poor consumer. DAN SOMERS: Not the poor consumer, the consumer. PAUL SOLMAN: But the overwhelmed consumer. DAN SOMERS: Yeah. Sometimes I think they're a bit overwhelmed. PAUL SOLMAN: Well, I speak personally... DAN SOMERS: You and I are always overwhelmed by the technology. PAUL SOLMAN: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? DAN SOMERS: I think it's a great thing. You know, one pipe into the home, one connection on all the time. Do whatever you want to do. Order something on E-commerce, watch a movie. We sort of like to think of it more as like the new AT&T on all the time.
NADER TAVASSOLI, Sloan School of Management, M.I.T.: Because money and making money off of technology is what pushes it, and people are not going to put their money behind a new technology unless they have done the research, they think people will embrace it. PAUL SOLMAN: Embrace it. Embrace what? With all these plans, choices, not to mention the hot spots, I, at least, needed help. And not from the folks selling this stuff. So we return to M.I.T.'s Intelligent Room. COMPUTER: I'm the computer psychotherapist. Please lie down on the couch. PAUL SOLMAN: Doctor, I'm worried about the future. Unfortunately, that's as far as the room is currently programmed to go. So I voiced at least some of my anxiety to the room's chief programmer, Michael Coen. Too many choices. Too much to learn and in the case of his technology, issues of privacy and basic humanity. I mean, all these cameras watching, the depersonalization of walking to this voice synthesizer. MICHAEL COEN: Let me ask you a question. Would you let the government put bells in your home that anyone in the world could ring any time of the day or night every day of the week?
MICHAEL COEN: Yes, exactly. And not only is it a bell, these are bells with microphones attached. Aren't you worried that people from anywhere could eavesdrop on you at any time of the day? And of course you'll say to me the telephone can't be abused that way, and I'll say, "yes, it can, but you've been socialized not to worry about it." So it may well be that my generation and people living today won't be comfortable with this technology, but I think you can bet on it, that their children aren't going to notice it any more than you are the telephone in your home. PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, the Intelligent Room itself may be just a glimmer of the telecom future we'll have to adapt to, says Nader Tavassoli. Maybe, in the hand of researchers at M.I.T., AT&T or somewhere else, telephony could someday even become telepathy. |
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| Telephones for future generations | ||||||||||||||||||||
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PAUL SOLMAN: And if you think that's far out, how about a life that's pure telephony? NADER TAVASSOLI: Here in the artificial intelligence lab, the question is, can you through information recreate a person, a soul? And maybe at that point it's my brain in a fish tank hooked up to the Internet. You know, I might be having fun on the Web, I might be interacting with others, playing virtual games, competing as part of a video game. Who knows? PAUL SOLMAN: Right. Who knows what's in store? After all, we were amazed in searching AT&T's archives that it had promised Internet shopping 30 years ago. SPOKESMAN FROM THE PAST: Later in the afternoon, Pat is browsing around a dress shop on her picture phone. PAUL SOLMAN: All this future shock suggested one last question: We're overwhelmed by all the choices that telecom future seems to offer, but can people avoid the hassle entirely and just turn their backs on the computer-driven world of telecom? NADER TAVASSOLI: Oh, the computer already has hypnotized them into voting yes in terms of technology, yes. PAUL SOLMAN: Might it be that technology sort of sneaks up on us? It does sucker us in in a certain way. NADER TAVASSOLI: I believe so. Any technology, any... anything that adds value to our lives or that are perceived to add value, it changes the way we, you know, think about it. PAUL SOLMAN: In the end, then, we may think we want what telecommunications technology has to offer because the technology itself has convinced us there's no alternative. SPOKESPERSON: It's for you. PAUL SOLMAN: In which case, our choosing among Bell Atlantic, AT&T
and who knows how many others, CARTOON CHARACTER: Confidentially, I think the idea has questionable sociological ramifications. |
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PAUL
SOLMAN: AT&T's vision of the telephone's fantastic future as of
30 years ago.
PAUL
SOLMAN: While the rest of us are overwhelmed with telecom choices, long
distance, cell phones, and cable, mavericks like these are going straight
to the Internet and beyond.
MICHAEL
COEN: Yes. These are the particular missiles.
ANNOUNCER:
Every day new communications companies enter the picture.
PAUL
SOLMAN: Ma Bell's chief financial officer tried to help me through its
panoply of plans. 
PAUL
SOLMAN: Now, you might think veteran business correspondents would be
plugged in enough to current technology to make such choices. Hello?
But honestly, I, at least, am as overmatched as any of you. Hi. Even
though AT&T itself told us this was all coming as at the World's
Fair in my native New York City back in 1964. 
PAUL
SOLMAN: So this is a cable TV system. 
SPOKESMAN:
Junior is getting help with his homework. The program comes from an
education center and is carried on a special TV circuit via telephone
wave-guide, a hollow tube that can carry hundreds of television programs
and telephone calls at one time. 
JEFF
WALDHUTER, Technology Director, Bell Atlantic: PBS.org.
COMPUTER
IMAGE: I love this broad band stuff. Through a cable modem, I was able
to find all that stuff and download it in less than a second. 
PAUL
SOLMAN: Oh, great. The telephone. The Internet. The TV -- on all the
time. If we weren't already anxious enough, this could absolutely paralyze
us. But no matter how overwhelmed we may feel, why worry? In a capitalist
economy like ours, as M.I.T. Marketing Professor Nader Tavassoli, we
only get what we're willing to pay for, what we presumably want. 
PAUL
SOLMAN: Oh, I get it -- the telephone. 
NADER
TAVASSOLI: Way out in the future, I wouldn't even have to call somebody.
Just based on my thoughts, based on my needs, a software might recognize
it, download it, change the air conditioning, have a certain kind of
dinner ready when I come home, play a certain song on the radio. 
might
not be that much of a choice at all, because as AT&T foresaw decades
ago, not many of us are liable to go in on our own.