Pervasive computing and green futures

I'm in London, on the second half of a trip that's involved going to an academic conference and doing some Institute-related work (though I met enough people at the former interested in the future for it to count as work-related).

Saw a recent article in Green Futures, which is published here in the UK, on pervasive computing (or ambient computing, as the article calls it) and its potential impacts. Most of the piece is a survey of fairly well-known stuff to readers of Future Now-- RFID, supply chain, smart home-- but it's a reasonably good survey, and points too toward some environmental impacts of these technologies.

In ways that I need to understand more systematically, I get the sense that there are some deep cultural differences in the way commentators in the US, UK, and Europe look on pervasive computing. Not just in the ways they assign priority to economic benefits, privacy loss, surveillance state concerns, etc.; it's subtler than that, but I'm not quite sure how. Ian Pearson, BT's chief futurists, says that in his experience Americans tend to be more enthusiastic about transhumanism than their European counterparts; if it's true, it must reflect a sense of instincts about technology that play out elsewhere.

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