The Guardian

London

You don’t need a key to get into the new Audi 2004 A8. You just wave your hand in front of a tiny sensor that scan your fingerprints and the doors open. But they will do so only if you’re the owner of this $60,000 luxury automobile with its 12-speaker spatial sound system.

The Audi A8’s sensor, though, is more than a security device. After fingerprint identification, the car’s computer tunes the radio to your favourite stations, the mirrors swivel according to your established preferences, and the driver’s seat sculpts itself to your bottom. Things are invented not to satisfy idle whims, but to change our world. The wheel, powered flight and telephone — these were important developments about which one could get excited. Slippers with headlights and a remote control-operated sliding door for the new Peugeot 807 GLX 2.2 people carrier are not.

Even recently, there have been inventions devised expressly to solve important social problems. The British inventor Trevor Baylis’s clockwork radio is among the most feted of these, not just because the simplicity of its concept matches the nobility of its intended purpose, but also because it very readily shows that innovation can be noble and socially useful even in our decadent era. In 1991, Baylis saw a TV documentary on the spread of HIV in Africa and recognised that remote African communities needed a means of accessing health and news broadcasts that didn’t rely on mains electricity or batteries. He was inspired to invent his wind-up radio.

Increasingly such innovations stand out as exceptional. Still the dubious gadgets keep coming. Consider the Bug Buster. This battery-operated vacuum cleaner exerts enough gentle suction to pull a spider into its tube without damaging the baffled arachnid. The Soundbug and the size of a computer mouse, it turns any hard surface into a speaker. Plug it into your CD player or computer, stick the sucker to a door, window or desk, hit play and prepare to be amazed.

Researchers at MIT’s prestigious media lab are currently working on a project to use stationary car windows as screens for projecting films or web pages, or even as advertising hoardings aimed at pedestrians or motorists. Such a project, of course, will be steeped in technical ingenuity.

“I like to call it a Faustian bargain,’’ says Neil Postman, professor of media ecology at New York University. “This means that for every advantage that a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost. Think of the automobile, which, for all its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities and degraded natural landscape.”

Patrick Dixon, Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School, and author of ‘Futurewise’ delivers a eulogy to the 3G phone’s impact on our lives, “Let’s say there’s a big terrorist bomb and say there are 5,00,000 video phones there and it’s well known that CNN, Sky and the BBC pay for video clips, and you’re just walking past. Within one second you can press record and the send button to CNN and suddenly your video could be on CNN live. “Or say I’m abroad — and I do travel a lot — flying between 40 and 80 times a year. I want to see my family, not just phone them. And they will want to see, well perhaps not me, but where I am. They’ll want to see what Malaysia looks like, take in a shot of the cafe, see the waitress waving at them back in London.’’

This all sounds great fun, but only in a society where all our basic needs are met could we be so pleasurably diverted by gadgets. It’s not only fun to be excited by the latest gadget, it gives us the feeling too that we’re part of the forward flow of life. It also gives us something easy to talk about: we make connections with people by discussing what our gadgets can do, even by laughing at our own silliness.

Maybe the definition of need has changed. For techno fetishists such as Dixon, the need for diverting technology is intense. Magazines publishe supplements on “50 gadgets every man should own’’. Each product introduced with “Why you can’t live without this’’, and the answers are unremittingly feeble.

You might argue that we fickle things are getting tired even of this decadence. The news that the Innovations catalogue (of new products) is about to close might seem to be evidence for this. Trevor Baylis once said that anyone who has “slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf’’ is capable of invention. The Innovations catalogue exists as proof that there are people with less perception than a wrapped loaf who are inventing things; and more, even dimmer, who are prepared to buy them.

The closure of the Innovations catalogue doesn’t show we are tired of gadgets; rather, we are tired of ones that don’t work. Our obsession with gadgetry goes on and the appliance of science to satisfying our laziest desires continues. That’s why the people at Electrolux have spent the best part of a decade devising the Trilobite, the world’s first automatic vacuum cleaner, packing into it all kinds of ingenuity. Even though it cannot be used to clean stairs, this 13 cm high, 35 cm wide vac is low enough to clean under really low furniture and beds and, thanks to its sonar, can avoid such potentially disastrous obstacles as dogs’ bowls. “The machine ‘sees’ the same way a bat does,’’ says Lars Dahl, technical project manager. “The two wheels with independent suspension are powered by individual motors. This means that the vacuum cleaner can easily navigate over cables and the edges of rugs.’’ Ingenious. But why did the clever people at Electrolux spend so much time and brainpower on the Trilobite?

“Our intention is to make life easier for people,’’ says Michael Treschow, Electrolux’s president. “And what could possibly be easier than an automatic vacuum cleaner?’’ This is what people who want to flog us fatuous kit are always saying. In an electrical store the other day, I put on a pair of Olympus FMD-700 Eye-Trek TV glasses. By looking into them one is supposed to be able to simulate the effect of watching a 52inch television from six feet away. The bigger question, though, is what are they for. “They’re fantastic,’’ said nice Alan, who really wanted to sell a pair. “You can use them to watch anything — videos, DVDs, TV, camcorder or your Playstation 2.’’ What — all in the privacy of my own head? “That’s right. It’s all about making the entertainment experience easier. You don’t have to crane your neck; you just lie in whatever position is comfortable. You won’t have to leave bed ever again.’’ If this is right, one of technology’s ends is to reduce our lives to such blob-like stasis and hardly interact with others. Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard possessions and live simply, but to buy stuff to reduce space in which we might contemplate our shame.