Rather than holding paper currency, the new wallet will store unforgeable digital money. Today when you hand someone a dollar bill, check, gift certificate, or other negotiable instrument, the transfer of paper represents a transfer of funds. But money does not have to be expressed on paper. Credit card charges and wired funds are exchanges of digital financial information. Tomorrow the wallet PC will make it easy for anyone to spend and accept digital funds. Your wallet will link into a store’s computer to allow money to be transferred without any physical exchange at a cash register. Digital cash will be used in interpersonal transactions, too. If your son needs money, you might digitally slip five bucks from your wallet PC to his.
When wallet PCs are ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that now plague airport terminals, theaters, and other locations where people queue to show identification or a ticket. As you pass through an airport gate, for example, your wallet PC will connect to the airport’s computers and verify that you have paid for a ticket. You won’t need a key or magnetic card key to get through doors either. Your wallet PC will identify you to the computer controlling the lock.
As cash and credit cards begin to disappear, criminals may target the wallet PC, so there will have to be safeguards to prevent a wallet PC from being used in the same manner as a stolen charge card. The wallet PC will store the “keys” you’ll use to identify yourself. You will be able to invalidate your keys easily, and they will be changed regularly. For some important transactions, just having the key in your wallet PC won’t be enough. One solution is to have you enter a password at the time of the transaction. Automatic teller machines ask you to provide a personal identification number, which is just a very short password. Another option, which would eliminate the need for you to remember a password, is the use of biometric measurements. Individual biometric measurements are more secure and almost certainly will be included eventually in some wallet PCs.
A biometric security system records a physical trait, such as a voiceprint or a fingerprint. For example, your wallet PC might demand that you read aloud a random word that it flashes on its screen or that you press your thumb against the side of the device whenever you are about to conduct a transaction with significant financial implications. The wallet will compare what it “heard” or “felt” with its digital record of your voice- or thumbprint.
Wallet PCs with the proper equipment will be able to tell you exactly where you are anyplace on the face of Earth. The Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites in an orbit around Earth broadcast signals that permit jetliners, oceangoing boats, and cruise missiles, or hikers with handheld GPS receivers, to know their exact location to within a few hundred feet. Such devices are currently available for a few hundred dollars, and they will be built into many wallet PCs.
The wallet PC will connect you to the information highway while you travel a real highway, and tell you where you are. Its built-in speaker will be able to dictate directions to let you know that a freeway exit is coming up or that the next intersection has frequent accidents. It will monitor digital traffic reports and warn you that you’d better leave for an airport early, or suggest an alternate route. The wallet PC’s color maps will overlay your location with whatever kinds of information you desire—road and weather conditions, campgrounds, scenic spots, even fast-food outlets. You might ask, “Where’s the nearest Chinese restaurant that is still open?” and the information requested will be transmitted to the wallet by wireless network. Off the roads, on a hike in the woods, it will be your compass and as useful as your Swiss Army knife.
In fact, I think of the wallet PC as the new Swiss Army knife. I had one of those knives when I was a kid. Mine was neither the most basic with just two blades nor the one with a workshop’s worth of equipment. It had the classic shiny red handle with the white cross and lots of blades and attachments, including a screwdriver, a tiny pair of scissors, and even a corkscrew (although at the time I had no use for that particular accessory). Some wallet PCs will be simple and elegant and offer only the essentials, such as a small screen, a microphone, a secure way to transact business with digital money, and the capability to read or otherwise use basic information. Others will bristle with all kinds of gadgets, including cameras, scanners that will be able to read printed text or handwriting, and receivers with the global-positioning capability. Most will have a panic button for you to press if you need emergency help. Some models will include thermometers, barometers, altimeters, and heart-rate sensors.
Prices will vary accordingly, but generally wallet PCs will be priced about the way cameras are today. Simple, single-purpose “smart cards” for digital currency will cost about what a disposable camera does now, whereas, like an elaborate camera, a really sophisticated wallet PC might cost $1,000 or more, but it will outperform the most exotic computer of just a decade ago. Smart cards, the most basic form of the wallet PC, look like credit cards and are popular now in Europe. Their microprocessors are embedded within the plastic. The smart card of the future will identify its owner and store digital money, tickets, and medical information. It won’t have a screen, audio capabilities, or any of the more elaborate options of the more expensive wallet PCs. It will be handy for travel or as a backup, and may be sufficient by itself for some people’s uses.
If you aren’t carrying a wallet PC, you’ll still have access to the highway by using kiosks—some free, some requiring payment of a fee—which will be found in office buildings, shopping malls, and airports in much the same spirit as drinking fountains, rest rooms, and pay phones. In fact, they will replace not only pay phones but also banking machines, because they will offer their capabilities as well as all the other highway applications, from sending and receiving messages to scanning maps and buying tickets. Access to kiosks will be essential, and available everywhere. Some kiosks will display advertising links to specific services when you first log on—a bit like the phones in airports that connect right to hotel and rental-car reservations. Like the cash machines we find in airports today, they will look like rugged devices, but inside they will also be PCs.
No matter what form the PC takes, users will still have to be able to navigate their way through its applications. Think of the way you use your television remote control today to choose what you want to watch. Future systems with more choices will have to do better. They’ll have to avoid making you go step-by-step through all the options. Instead of having to remember which channel number to use to find a program, you will be shown a graphical menu and be able to select what you want by pointing to an easy-to-understand image.
You won’t necessarily have to point to make your point. Eventually we’ll also be able to speak to our televisions, personal computers, or other information appliances. At first we’ll have to keep to a limited vocabulary, but eventually our exchanges will become quite conversational. This capability requires powerful hardware and software, because conversation that a human can understand effortlessly is very hard for a computer to interpret. Already, voice recognition works fine for a small set of predefined commands, such as “Call my sister.” It’s much more difficult for a computer to decipher an arbitrary sentence, but in the next ten years this too will become possible.