PHILADELPHIA (AP) - For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.

The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city - probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers.

Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel - including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.

--From today's technology news, by David B. Caruso.

Later in the story it quotes a university official who's spearheading the project that wireless access should be like NPR or PBS, free as the air.

Yet another part of the world of "Machina Obscura" and "Aquaria" is coming into being... just in MO and Aquaria I called them "comm boosters" and they were in every room or every few dozen yards.

I suspect we won't have nanobot interfaces in my lifetime, but we already have WorkMates after a fashion -- PDAs. They don't have personalities yet and they're not up to Wally's processing standards but many of them are WiFi and they can be loaded with task-specific software. Personalities won't be long in coming. It won't be long before they're running our lives. In the back history of MO and Aquaria the WorkMates were there decades before nano interfaces. People could hook to their WorkMates, and run NetSpace through them. The WorkMates stored the software and provided the NetSpace interface. It wasn't until they cracked storage in the brain itself and got nanos sophisticated enough to act as an interface that the WorkMates got relegated to sidekick status. By the time of Aeon the AI population of the world was probably three or four times that of the organic population, counting all the Aivatars, WorkMates, LifeMates, bots and true AIs. They were at 13.5 Billion in 2230, in organic population.

They're like a cancer... appropriate name for Raven and his cohorts, anyway.

What are we going to do with all these people when automation takes their jobs? Is everyone going to become a web designer? What's going to be the new McJob?

I heard a story on All Things Considered yesterday about how McDonalds is trying out self-service computer ordering terminals in a few cities. The Krystals down the road not half a mile from me advertises that it has a WiFi hotspot in the store.

We're all just nodes.