Mega-Utilities Drive Invisible Technologies

Despite their apparent simplicity, invisible technologies represent the pinnacle of engineering accomplishments in digital design, networking, user interfaces, and machine learning as well as in the social science disciplines of psychology and anthropology. It takes a lot of science to move technology from the foreground to the background. This paper focuses on leading-edge science that is inspiring the next generation of pervasive computing. It considers how computers are becoming pervasive in part because megahertz, megabits per second, and megabytes have become utilities much like water, gas, and electricity.