Resumen
This essay focuses on the emergence of processing devices in the technological world. They are compared with mosquitoes in some ways. Like mosquitoes, these devices will be responsible for feeding themselves, whether by harvesting radio frequency fields, light, chemical reactions with the environment, or small changes in air pressure or temperature. The manner in which data, instructions, and messages will diffuse throughout such a system, and the automatic provision of redundancy, will probably correspond more to metaphors drawn from biology, physics, and chemistry than to current computer engineering practice. Some researchers seek to make processors part of the built environment, dispersing them throughout building materials like wallboard or laminated tabletops, or even suspending them in a viscous coating that can be painted onto surfaces. Agents of various sorts can reside in the environment, watching information as it goes by, or wandering about looking for it. Some more interesting opportunities emerge if they create an ecosystem of more than one "species" of processor.