We will be answering to cellphones of future
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, February 16, 2006
I know we’re supposed to be panicked about bird flu, but if you ask me, cellphones pose a greater threat, and they’re already on our shores.
Unwilling to leave annoying enough alone, engineers are developing ‘‘trainable” phones that will learn where you are, what you’re doing and when you want to be interrupted and when you don’t. (Uh, how about never?)
What’s not to like about a phone bending over backward to serve its master? Plenty, it turns out. Unlike a polite person, a courteous phone actually needs to snoop in your business in order to use its manners. Hey, sorry to butt in, but if I don’t know your every move, how can I help you manage your incoming calls?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I have some distant memory of the old days, when people who didn’t want to be responsible for an inappropriate ring could simply switch their phones to ‘‘manners mode.” Then, when you felt your bag vibrating, you’d discreetly check caller ID and either send the call to voice mail or step outside to talk.
But at a time when people expect to reach you instantly, and on every try, voice mail’s not good enough anymore. If you let your cell’s answering machine to pick up, as I did the other day, you’ll get panicky messages from friends and family members concerned that you’ve been abducted. ‘‘Are you OK?” my best friend wanted to know. ‘‘I’ve been calling you for the past eight minutes and you haven’t picked up.”
Which brings us to the smarty-pants phones: Embedded with GPS chips and other sensors, they’ll be able to determine not only your location, but whether you’re moving, talking, speedingor stuffing your face in the parking lot of a grocery store. (OK, maybe not that. Even cellphones have a sense of decency.)Hip to your whereabouts and your preferences, the phones may be able to send the caller to voice mail or give him an option: ‘‘She’s in a client meeting. Do you want to interrupt?”
When I mentioned this to one of my biggest clients (my editor), she said she’d be OK with a nosy phone ‘‘as long as you could lie to it.”
Heh, heh, heh. The check’s in the mail. Nothing like putting one over an inanimate object.
But what a slippery slope. First you’re wasting energy misleading the phone you yourself bought. Next, you’re covering your bases, so that your mother or spouse or boss doesn’t realize his or her calls aren’t getting through but others are. Is that progress or what? A computer starting fights among people.
If only there was some kind of vaccine we could take to ward off the phones of the future. Tamifone, perhaps?
