Jeeves 2.0 - Your Personal Cloud Awaits

OK, I'm going to go right ahead and say it: Owls are a pretty-much hopeless base on which to build a communications infrastructure. In J.K. Rowling's ludicrously popular Harry Potter books these secretly intelligent and loyal predators are an ever-present mail system that underpins much of the magical world, but let's face it, they're rubbish, aren't they? They spend half their time getting lost, killed or just being grumpy about whether or not they've been kept in fresh mice (which one hopes aren't secretly magical or sentient too) and by the time the world (seemingly represented by England) is in crisis everyone resorts to jury-rigging their magical projections into mouthpieces anyway.

There is really nothing stopping wizards from using a phone.

So why even bother to have them in the books? Because they're mysterious, they're cute and, whether we've actually seen one of the razor-brained killers for ourselves or not, they're something personal that follows the protagonists through life and causes them great personal pain when they're lost or stop functioning.

Sounds like an iPhone to me.

Of course, by future/magical standards, phones are currently at least as rubbish as owls; not least because we are at least as much at their beck and call as they are at ours. They may not be hungry for fresh-dead rodents, but who hasn't had their smartphone whinge at them about being hungry until it finally decides to turn its metaphorical back on us and refuse to communicate with us until we feed it?

There is really nothing stopping you from hiring a PA.

A few months ago, with great fanfare, Apple announced the launch of Siri to accompany the new iPhone 4S.  As a voice-activated personal assistant it was pretty likely to change everybody's lives by being able to tell people what the weather was likely to be like soon or get confused about who you wanted to call and, indeed, has proved to be about as useful to enthusiastic adopters as Android 4.0's face-unlock and the Xbox Kinect's Minority-Report-esque hand-swiping interface. It's a nice party-trick to show your friends but at the end of the day you'll just push the buttons and get it done in half the time and far more reliably.

But I've now got so far off the point that I've nearly got lost. Here's the point:

What we need is our own personal robots.

Wait.

I'm going to take a deep breath and say something I never thought I'd let myself think:

Maybe we don't all need our own personal robots.

Let's face it: the little ones are annoying & the big ones want to kill you.
Image: Blade Runner. Copyright: Warner Bros.

With all the advances in robots that can walk, fly, run, jump, unscrew lids from things and maintain pleasant conversation, there isn't really much short-term prospect that they'll be able to do all of this, unobtrusively follow us all of us around (all of us) and quietly run our lives without constantly just getting in our/each other's/their own way or running out of juice and falling over. And what exactly are they going to be getting done as they walk/crawl/fly/slither along? Opening doors for us as they remember our friends birthdays? I've already outsourced my memory to my phone and the doors already open themselves. On the human planetary colony of Solaria envisaged in Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun, the tiny human population all have dozens of personal robots to assist them with every facet of their lives but I get the feeling that even one would would start to become a hindrance as much as a benefit, until they're good enough to replace us anyway.

I think what we really need (at least to tide us over until we all retreat inside a superpowered personal future, at least) is a personalised infrastructure. My music and photos and videos don't live at home, or even on my phone or MP3 player any more, they're somewhere out "in the Cloud" and can simply be summoned to wherever I need them, whenever I want. Last weekend (Sunday evening to be precise) I thought of a film that my brother had recommended, looked it up on my IMDB app, ordered it using my Amazon app and it was on my desk at work before lunchtime the next day. But we don't even need to rely on people to recommend things for us or even deliver them any more. My new Virgin Media TiVo box arrived last week and after a few days of training it's already pretty good at predicting and automatically recording shows it thinks I'll like (and even has the decency to tell me why). I sold my car last year because I couldn't justify the running costs or afford the insurance any more, but increasing numbers of my friends are turning to ZipCar or similar car clubs, which let them track down a compatible car using GPS on their phone, hop in, drive it wherever they need to, then drop it off somewhere else later. Who needs a car any more when you can have them stashed all over the place just waiting for you?

Of course these systems still leave a lot to be desired. Who hasn't waited days for a parcel that hasn't arrived or had to spend their Saturday morning queuing at the Post Office for something that that couldn't quite be smashed in through the letter box? Who hasn't waited weeks for the one movie they actually wanted from LoveFilm whilst patiently sitting through the dross they don't even remember ordering? And I'm wearily informed by my ZipCar-using friends that picking up (or dropping off) a car isn't quite as easy as radioing KITT and asking him to meet you around the corner in 30 seconds.

Bloody Entropy.

But it's pretty good though, isn't it? Of course we may never (need to) get to the 1950s vision of a vacuum-tube based future, much parodied by Futurama et al,  in which goods and even people are whizzed effortlessly around the metropolis through an innumerable series of interconnected tunnels that connect pretty much everything to pretty much everything else. Sadly after a brief high-water mark the tubes have been relegated to shunting small change around supermarkets. For now our only communication tubes are digital and the physical goods still tend to require some dude in a van to deliver them. For now*.

Imagine the tailbacks around IKEA.

So perhaps a future of personal robotic servants isn't one we need to be aiming towards. Perhaps we'll be happier and more efficient with a PA in our pocket (or wired directly into our brains) and an infrastructure intelligent and integrated enough to get on with organising the rest for us without a power-hungry butler occupying the seat next to us (I can't get a seat on the bus half the time anyway). When I was at university (way back in the mists of time) I was briefly fascinated when the campus got a live webcam streaming a view of the piazza outside the Student Union so that you could see what was going on before you bothered leaving your room to join in (or just get hammered back in halls).  Last November I went laser-shooting at Bunker 51, somewhere under the derelict factories of East London and found myself staring at the prototype of a remotely operated, webcam-targeted paintball turret that armchair warriors can use to punish real people in real woods from the safety of home using a Playstation 3 app. And who wants the robots calling those kinds of shots?

Still can't make my tea though.