At Home

This is the Decade, the technocrats vow, when the American home will begin to emerge as a total environment--a place where modern man can live completely. By comparison, the houses and apartment buildings in which most of us now sleep and grab occasional meals will no doubt seem only minor improvements on the log cabin. By 1980, we may never need to leave home and, even more surprising, that may suit many of us just fine. We'll work and learn there, be informed and amused there by a battery of communications and entertainment devices that will enrich our lives more than the present facilities of an entire city. And when we feel like pursuing more personal and participational pleasures, we'll be able to do that at home, too, making today's wildest diversions seem like timid parlor games.

Some of the coming developments sound like futuristic fantasy, such as the "pleasure centers" we may plug ourselves into for living dreams of sex, adventure, violence or just plain serenity--that rarest of all commodities. There is justification for some pessimism about suds technological projections. particularly at a time when our everyday technology is (continued on page 162) At Home (continued from page 143) failing pitifully, but there is little doubt that the brave new world we've been promised is arriving. What the technocrats and the humanists debate is whether it will be the enslaved, superstructured world of Huxley's novel or a wonderland of free choices for a liberated mankind. To a great extent, it comes down to a question of how much convenience a person can stand.

Already researchers, tinkering with electronic jabs to various brain centers, have successfully stimulated people's hunger and then satisfied it with another pulse of electricity. They've induced deep, satisfying sleep the same way, and see the possibility of totally regulating a person's body to his self-prescribed schedule. Another group of scientists, working under very close wraps, is beginning to apply some new principles of information theory to the development of "feelie" movies for at-home stimulation rather than for the theatrical medium Huxley foresaw. It's been found that it takes only a hint of information to spur the mind into concocting a total impression. The researchers won't say how, but they've managed to give mere projected images the hallucinatory feel of material substance. The result, according to one erotically inclined experimenter, is "a way to give everyone his own Raquel Welch."

Experts from all fields were prodded by Connecticut's Institute for the Future to predict what else is coming. There was general agreement that the following developments will have arrived before the decade ends:

• Central data-storage facilities will be pumping all kinds of information to the public, transforming the home into a part-time school and making individual citizens proficient in such specialized fields as law and medicine.

• Contraceptives will be mass-administered, perhaps even through the seeding of water supplies. Social values regarding childbearing, rearing and sex will be greatly changed and becoming a parent will be considered a privilege rather than a right.

• Cheap, nonnarcotic drugs other than alcohol will be available to produce specific mood changes, bringing on euphoria, nonaggression, heightened perception and increased attention spans. Other drugs may be able to alter life styles totally.

• General immunizing agents will be in use to protect against nearly all bacterial and viral diseases, meaning, among other things, a cure at long last for the common cold.

R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the most visionary of Americans, says that the changes in the years ushering in the 21st Century "will be far greater than in our just completed century and a half.... We are engulfed in an invisible tidal wave that, as it draws away, will leave all humanity, if it survives, cast upon the Island of Success, uncomprehending of how it has all happened."

A great many of these predictions are coming true before their time. Housewives are already beginning to call on data centers to take over chores that only a few years ago would have been considered distinctly human and well beyond the grasp of your average emotion- and intuition-free computer. When a wealthy Los Angeles hostess held a dinner party for nearly 500 people last year, she hired a data-processing firm to draw up the seating plan. Short biographies of each guest were fed into the computer, which instantly ruminated on the conversations that might result from combining the various backgrounds. The seating plan came spewing out and the party, it's reported, was a great success.

The impending intrusion of technology into the once all-human household frightens many people. Anthropologist Margaret Mead says the technology explosion is "the major cause of the generation gap." Old folks who fret about all the new machinery instead of using it are missing out on a better life, she insists. It's also true, of course, that a segment of the young--communards are the extreme examples--also are in full revolt from technological largess. With this kind of widespread mistrust of galloping gadgetry, it's encouraging that the best thinking being done about the home of the future comes from men and women who share that mistrust. Ironically, much of what they hope to accomplish will be based on technology--but it will be aimed at restoring the primitive functions of a home.

"We keep getting more and more machines, but they don't seem to do much to satisfy our more basic needs and urges," says Joan Sprague, a Cambridge design consultant who is experimenting with functional aesthetics. "If people had more sympathetic environments, they'd be renewed at home instead of ground up. The great challenge is to make technology usable, to get total--not just tranquilized--comfort out of it." Tranquilized comfort is the soporific neutrality of watching television, rarely responding unless it's to laugh mechanically along with a canned audience. Total comfort, she says, comes from fulfillment of the atavistic needs for water, fire, sun, quiet, space--all of which will be built into the ideal home of the future and are frankly lacking in today's housing.

The late Richard Neutra, the renowned technological architect, reached a similar conclusion when he decided that his homes should be as perfectly joined with nature as birds' nests: securely wedged in forked branches and strategically positioned to yield the desired amounts of sun and shade. These controlled environments--capturing proper air movement, cooling and light--also allow complete freedom for the inhabitants. "An architect of human abodes could start as a bird or animal watcher," wrote Neutra. "Perhaps he should, in order to truly fit a naturalistic age which became increasingly sidetracked into 'glorious technology.'"

The goal is to create what Italian architect Jiancarlo De Carlo calls the "intelligent home": a living apparatus that "understands" what its occupants want and is so totally versatile that it can accommodate those needs immediately. Walls would spring up or disappear when the dweller felt the need for insulation or openness. Areas would be illuminated or darkened as an automatic response to the approach or departure of a body. Though this ultimate goal sounds beyond reach, some basic accomplishments in that direction have already been made. The greatest task for an architect is to arrange home space so that specific activities won't conflict with one another--and to do so without subdividing the entire home into claustrophobic individual rooms. Somehow, privacy and sound insulation have to be provided while giving inhabitants a feeling of the space beyond them.

Within the decade, that crucial problem will be solved through the development of "air walls" somewhat like the gusting curtains of heated air at many department-store entrances. Air walls will stop the flow of sound without blotting out space or sight. But, lacking these, Joan Sprague and her husband, Chet, an MIT architect, have already mastered a good deal of the problem by cutting windows, skylights and shafts through their old three-story home, so that even in a closet-sized bathroom on the second floor, one can gaze out at the sky. All the walls on the third floor were knocked out and a good deal of the ceiling, as well, creating a huge open living room with a honeycombed ceiling.

Most architects agree that such control and arrangement of light is one of the crucial factors in making the home a completely comfortable environment. Three recent major breakthroughs will be revolutionizing household lighting. Corning Glass Works has developed what it calls photochromic glass, which responds to increased amounts of sunlight by turning darker and darker. And New York engineer Alvin Marks has developed a means of electrically controlling the transparency of a specially sandwiched window glass. Both products are (continued on page 336) At Home (continued from page 162) being considered as possible ways to control and filter sunlight into a home.

But the most potentially revolutionary discovery will soon enable the householder to virtually forget about the need to provide a lighting system at all; his entire home will light up on its own. A Russian physicist observed in 1923 that a crystal similar to a diamond could be made to glow softly when it was subjected to an electric field. This property, which is now called electroluminescence, can be found in many materials and may soon eliminate all problems of glare and shadows. Everything will glow evenly. There will be no noticeable source of light. Walls--or floors, or a piece of furniture--will cast their own illumination.

The application of ultrasonics, another new technology, to the household has already begun. Several false-teeth cleaners that make dentures glisten with sound waves are now on the market and appliance makers expect to be washing clothes and dishes with sound before the end of the decade. And a whole spectrum of other gadgetry with new applications is on its way. Hoover has introduced a self-propelled vacuum cleaner. Polaroid has demonstrated an instant-developing movie film and National Cash Register, a few months ago, introduced a computerized bar. While the unit, which sells for a shade under $10,000, is aimed primarily at taverns, a spokesman says, "Someone might be serious enough about his entertaining to install one at home."

People with automated bars may be an elite few in this decade, but those using all sorts of other computerized home appliances will be typical citizens of the Seventies. "Think of all the things that go on in the household that are a pain in the ass," says Dr. Seymour H. Koenig, director of IBM's Watson Laboratories. "The sorts of mundane, routine, technical things like keeping track of groceries and making out checks, doing your income tax, even shopping--those are the things we can eliminate." With the development of computer utilities during the decade and the proliferation of the Bell System's Touch-Tone push-button telephones, virtually every citizen will be able to share a computer.

There won't be any problem about learning computer languages, since you'll be able to speak directly to the computer--and vice versa--with the information you need. Linked to a television receiver and a facsimile machine, it will deliver almost any information in almost any medium. "We'll give you sound and sight and printed paper. We'll give you unlimited educational material, send you a movie, show you how to repair your car or make a cake," says Dr. Koenig.

Computers for information retrieval will also arrive in the home in the near future. Harvey McMains, director of the management-sciences think tank at American Telephone and Telegraph, rigged up a computer as a control center for his home in Arizona several years ago. He could dial the house from anywhere and instruct the computer to turn on the air conditioning, open the garage door, even feed the clog. He admits that he even used the computer to write routine letters to relatives. Neiman-Marcus, the opulent Dallas department store, has offered what it calls a kitchen computer in its Christmas catalog. The $10,000 Honeywell machine, complete with cookbook references, includes a two-week programming course.

The Bell System's Picturephones--the television-telephones that have been shown at world's fairs and technology shows for about six years--are beginning to reach the customer. Picturephone service began in Pittsburgh last June and will reads Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington next year. By 1975, about 100,000 Picturephones will be beaming callers' faces and computer information around the country, and from that point the distribution will snowball. As one telephone official puts it, "This will be just like introducing the telephone years ago. People think it's a little bit too much at first, don't really think they have to have it and move slowly. But the more people who get them, the more additional people will want them to be able to communicate with the existing users. Pretty soon, you've got a full-scale network going and people forget they ever went without them."

There's an astounding difference in the ease and richness of communication by Picturephone, compared with conventional audio-only conversation. McMains estimates that adding the visual mode increases the effectiveness of communication about ten times. "People don't realize how much they communicate with expressions and gestures," adds Claude Davis, a developer of Picturephone at Bell Laboratories. "There are no words that can take the place of just throwing up your hands."

Diagrams and tabular data can be communicated by Picturephone, too, but without a machine at the other end to convert the material into hard copy, the receiver will have no way to retain the data he's been sent. Several Bell officials hint that their researchers are making excellent progress in developing a small, economical facsimile device that will give reproduction quality very close to the original and deliver a page in only three or four seconds. The device, they say, will be ready in about two or three years and will use the Picturephone-band network for transmission. With the combination of those two devices, Dr. Ed David, formerly with Bell Labs, notes, "communities of interest" will be tied together through unlimited communicative ability. "And once that happens, we'll be traveling for pleasure and communicating for work."

So the home suddenly becomes an office, too. It's a goal people have had for decades and, as auto traffic gets worse, public transportation falls further and further beneath minimum levels of efficiency, and office space becomes more and more costly, the prospect of having employees work at home is becoming increasingly attractive to many companies. McMains estimates that easily 15 percent of us will be working full time at home by the end of the decade and a goodly number of the remainder will be working a few days a week at home.

One of the thief barriers to cutting an office staff loose to work at home is the suspicion of employers that their employees, once out of sight, will be sleeping on the job. But research has shown that employees who are given a fair apportionment of work and left to schedule it for themselves give more attention to their work. And creative people, whether they be managers, advertising writers, architects, magazine editors, technicians or scientific researchers, show tremendous boosts in productivity when their minds are geared for it. For that reason, many firms are already turning their staffs loose, even without the communications network that will coordinate their contributions from remote locales.

But the Seventies will bring an even greater revolution in home avocations--in large part brought about by the evolution of home-entertainment devices. Take television, which has been justifiably criticized as too bland. Programing has always been aimed at reaching the broadest possible audience, because advertisers want to spend their money on air time that reaches the maximum number of potential buyers. Thus, the lowest-common-denominator shows have become the common fare and this great communications instrument has been made irrelevant.

Now, however, this may be ending, for packaged television recording promise an almost unlimited number of entertainment and educational possibilities. CBS' system of Electronic Video Recording, or EVR, among other competitors' products, is just now reaching the public. Special programs of every conceivable sort will be marketed in cartridges the way music is now sold on records. The buyer will have to be especially interested in the program or he won't invest in it, so programers will have to pitch to particular interest groups with the finest presentations in each area. Opera buffs will be able to buy beautiful color filmings and live-on-tape performances of the world's most accomplished singers, along with the highest-quality audio tracks. Sports fans will see crucial contests--and have the option of replaying then. The finest Broadway and Hollywood offerings will be on the shelf for private showings. The world's greatest teachers will lecture to a nationwide university.

Among the home video-recording systems, there is tremendous technological variety. Each one has a distinctly different potential, but the degree of public acceptance of each will remain a mystery for some time. At this stage, only systems being produced by the Sony Corporation and Avco will allow the customer to record his own programs--something the communications experts say is vital in order to really involve the viewer.

Eventually, though, most of the new systems will convert your television set from the present droning tranquilizer to a conduit for the most stimulating house guests and experiences you can have. At least that's the way it should work. Yet there are troubling signs that the ideal won't be attained immediately. For example, the titles of programs RCA indicates are under consideration for its initial library certainly don't promise a cultural explosion: My Favorite Chopin, Moon Landing, Great Moments in Baseball, Best of Broadway, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bedtime Stories by Dr. Seuss, Indianapolis 500 Highlights and Aesop's Fables. Looking beyond this culture gap, Dr. Peter Goldmark, the CBS inventor who created one of the first color-television systems, invented the long-playing record and directed the development of EVR, says the new system is "going to be the greatest revolution in communications since the book."

As far as book publishers are concerned, there are signs that Goldmark is right. CBS has disclosed that the home video-tape units make wonderfully economic formats for books. Individual pages are photographed in individual frames of the EVR films and combined on a single cassette. One cassette, which might sell for about $50, can contain about 500 novels--a formula that seems bound to end the use of encyclopedias as we know them today. And with the networks already airing television adaptations of novels (ABC recently ran a Harold Robbins serial, NBC is filming Fletcher Knebel's Vanished and NET won plaudits for its Forsyte Saga), the book as print definitely seems threatened.

In fact, the way some media visionaries talk of the home video-cassette revolution, it sounds like almost nothing will be immune to the effects of the new systems. "The impending cartridge revolution will have an enormous impact on ... every American institution." trumpeted Cinema magazine. "Financial empires will rise and fall; the 'home-entertainment center' will become the backbone of the national economy, surpassing the automobile in production. It will be a whole new ball game, with new rules, new winners, new losers, and everyone will be playing." Experts are predicting that the market for such systems will eventually reach about two billion dollars a year. But it's evident that the big-money pie will be sliced into many corporate portions as the consumer decides which system will give him the most for the least.

Right now, the front-runners are CBS' EVR and a system being launched by Avco called Carta-Vision. RCA may catch up, but its system (which will be one of the first consumer products to use the laser) looks like it's still years off. The CBS process uses cartridges resembling fat 45-rpm records. The user just drops the packet onto his attaché-case-sized player and pushes a button. The machine, which wires into any conventional television set, either black and white or color, automatically threads the filmlike tape past a scanning device and the electronic impulses are piped through to the viewing set. But costs are still high: CBS is introducing its players at $795 each and the half-hour cassettes are expected to cost about $30 each. Schools and businesses will be the chief markets at those prices, but CBS is hoping to bring consumer units down to between $200 and $300 and the tapes to $10.

Although you won't be able to make your own programs on Avco's system, you will be able to record the telecasts your set receives--a distinct advantage over the prepackaged programing of the CBS and RCA systems. The player unit will be a standard television set equipped with a slot in the side to receive standard quarter-inch video tapes, available either prerecorded or blank. The player-set combination will cost about $900 and the tapes will rent for about $5 from chain stores. All of the cartridge producers are now researching the marketing possibilities of such rental setups, as well as over-the-counter sales through standard record outlets.

Television itself is bound to undergo tremendous gyrations in programing as its role is redefined not only by the home video cassette but also by cable television. Cable TV, in a sense, undoes what Marconi accomplished when he invented the wireless radio. Coaxial or two-channel cables are strung directly from a cable station to the viewers' sets. The direct link-up eliminates all the interference problems that have plagued urban and rural viewers and it greatly expands the viewing options. The FCC recently acted to make cable-television companies provide their own programing in addition to piping out the standard network fare. New York City just signed contracts with CATV companies that call for the provision of at least 24 channels by 1973. With this programing proliferation, special-interest, public-service and educational broadcasting will have no problem getting on the air; the challenge will be attracting the newly available audience.

While all this communications equipment revolutionizes our entertainment viewing habits, there is also the possibility that it could change even our form of government. Once cable circuits are linked to television sets, it will be possible for the viewer to respond to programing by pushing a button--perhaps even on his Touch-Tone phone--to tell the broadcasters what he thinks. Conceivably, the need for a representative government could be eliminated by the establishment of a direct democracy that focuses on the television set. An instant vote on a major national issue would eliminate the cost and the delay of power politicking--and might be a way to re-involve the citizenry. Television could become the hall for a nationwide town meeting.

As we move through this technological decade, even the home necessities we buy will be more and more different from the objects and materials we know today. Dr. Richard Gordon, in charge of developing new product ideas at Monsanto, says research in chemistry and plastics has led to the fabrication of revolutionary new materials for particular uses. We'll be getting virtually indestructible furniture, for example, from the synthesis of polymer and silicone. It won't burn, scratch or mar. It's as substantial as the most solid natural materials and it can be cast instantly.

Not only will we soon see such technology changing our home surroundings but we will also experience a revolution in our eating habits at home. Already, meals as we once knew them are almost an abandoned tradition. John Angeline, a food specialist at Arthur D. Little, Inc., says the typical American family now eats only about three full meals together a week. The family dinner is going the way of the breakfast and lunch, and food itself is just beginning to catch up with that trend. Pop-up snacks that can be warmed in a toaster or premade meals quickly heated in microwave ovens are beginning to replace even the standard on-the-run sandwiches. On the other hand, it is inevitable that such technological changes will widen the trend to real cooking as a festive, ceremonial, even ritualistic event. Already, amateur chefs are rediscovering the fun of occasionally going all out with authentically prepared fondues or exotic foreign dishes such as paella.

This combination of the synthetic and the natural will be found throughout our home lives. At the same time that we'll be getting four together for bridge--with three of the players electronic figments of a computer's imagination--we'll be gathering at home for sober, even tortuous encounter groups aimed at getting ourselves straight as human beings. It's happening already. In New York City, probably the most technologized and depersonalized environment in the world, more than 5000 encounter groups are running through their weeping, hugging, screaming, massaging paces every week.

Perhaps more than anything else, exploration of our senses through drugs, machines and interpersonal contact will be the leading leisure pursuit of the decade. We'll start with the legalization of mind drugs--a development almost unanimously considered inevitable by the futurists. "The whole trend of society already is toward much sex, God seeking and mind expansion," says Donald Michael of the Center for Research on the Utilization of Scientific Knowledge. "Self-enlarging, self-enhancing explorations are going to erode puritanism fast. The IBM types and the suburbanites, Brahmin WASPs and even a few Congressmen are all into playing with their minds. There won't be any stopping this, because there's no reward for society in stopping it. If we're lucky, by the time the decade's over, we'll be able to do it all without drugs."

A means of mind alteration without drugs that we're just now learning about depends on the fact that the brain produces measurable alpha waves during a state of relaxed, unfocused wakefulness. Using devices that encircle the head, pick up the waves and translate them into a light or a tone, experimenters have found that most people can, with practice, produce such waves at will. Adepts report that sustained periods of alpha activity give them a feeling of serenity, tranquillity and inner awareness. While some researchers look forward to a time when feedback devices may permit conscious control of such bodily functions as temperature and heartbeat--perhaps even skin wrinkling and aging--the simpler alpha-wave devices are here now and being marketed as the fascinating toys they are.

Even packaged adult games are likely to take the form of self-exploration and encounter therapy. The most successful games have always been ones that offer the players a chance to adopt roles they'd like to play in everyday life; Monopoly makes everyone a tycoon. And the game makers are now bringing political and social issues onto the game board. A sudden flood of war games that let players take the roles of Rommel, Patton, Napoleon and Hitler are now available. "If you're a bloodthirsty, militaristic, barbaric Hun, we have a place for you. Join us and crush, kill and destroy," states one war-game ad, whose intricate battle re-enactments are designed by a man who claims to be a pacifist. Several race-oriented games hit the market in the past year offering white players the chance to vicariously experience the frustrations of being urban blacks.

Such new home-entertainment games and devices are hardly remarkable in themselves; they are mere products of our social and technological development. But put all this together--the sociopolitical games, the drug explosion and mind expansion, the television revolution and, especially, computerized work and leisure, all within one home--and you have an idea of what the futurists are talking about when they say the home will soon be a total environment. IBM's Dr. Koenig predicts: "In ten years, if the economy recovers and the young people aren't totally turned off by technology, and we haven't blown ourselves up, we'll have freed people from drudgery and provided them with unlimited guidance. Things will be doubly easy for them, and when you consider what the collective effect of all that potential is, you'll see that it's a revolution."