Brrr! not just another frosty January in Cambridge, not just a new year, but 010101: the real dawn of the new millennium. But it feels like a digital winter in more ways than that. The Internet bubble deflated, leaving not only pissy investors and a chill on Wall Street but a generation of hackers frozen like mastodons in the Microsoft ice age, and a lot of decent people wondering: What good is this computer stuff anyway? Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but is it really making life more worth living? Where's the beef?

Even at the MIT Media Lab, which has been ground zero for blast after digital blast, teams are scrambling to pioneer a post-computer society, exploring implications for life in the numinous high- tech beyond, sometime after the Internet. A few years ago, to teethe on this, we launched an effort called Things That Think (TTT), our cute name for a research thrust to explore embedded intelligence very broadly. What might happen when commonplace objects, like shoes or underwear or furniture or toys, begin to contain more sensory and computer power than we can currently predict, and when innate, wireless nets fluidly link them to the rest of the planet's infinitely scaling information systems? Surely, thinking machinery will infest heretofore inanimate things. What then? The implications are fantastic and profound.