The May 1997 RAND White Paper Critical Technologies in a Global Context: A Review of National Reports [US, Germany, France, UK and Japan] shows NO mention of the following as being 'critical technologies':
Intelligent Houses
Real Time Markets - internet-based
Co-Generation for homes
Distributed, Point Source Power Systems

Also, I had hoped they would have talked about "Educational Visualization." But no.

So how do we get Intelligent Houses, Real Time Markets, Co-generation and distributed, point source electrical systems onto the critical technologies lists?

At least one organization, however, is working on the real time market problems. There is some very interesting work on 'Smart Matter' being done at Xerox PARC by Bernardo Huberman and his team. The URL for this is:

ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/dynamics/multiagent.html
Jock Gill


File Date: 14 Aug 97