My Vision: Human Senses & Technology

The future of technology can be summarized by the former commercial assaults of our senses and the consumerization of gadgetry.

In 1940, “Fantasia” entered theaters, and had remarkable sound that could move from one side of the room to the other. It shook the world. Fast forward to Google Glass. What do these have in common? The human brain interacts with these technologies using signal and call electrical charges.

The other four common senses are sight, smell, touch, and taste. Or, neurologically speaking, they all share one common element; electric signals in our brains.

The next pinnacle of human senses is the future of Augmented Reality, brought on by the advancement of processing power and depth cameras. When the camera turns a room into 1’s and 0’s in three-dimensional space, it can create a visual overlay of nearly anything, and can interact with a users movement. Think of the holo-deck from star trek.

After we are given this virtual reality, the next logical technology takeover is the sense of touch. Remember the nintendo powerglove? Ask any 30 year old male and they probably wanted one as a kid. The technology exists to wear a glove, or any other article of clothing, that creates a sense of weight, touch, temperature, pressure, and mass. It does no good for the military to create an AR war-zone that doesn’t interact with a soldier on a touch and feel basis.

In the dystopian future, we have microchips that turn our brain into supercomputers, because, according to research, supercomputers will be more powerful than the human brain by 2026. Much like the resurgence of Turntables and LP’s, there will be a rebellion to this movement of digitalizing the human brain. Imagine Mad Max style refugees who preach analog and roam through the forests, becoming closer to nature. The rest of us will succumb to the mind-numbing marketing from Microsoft and Verizon, (apple being a relic of the “cell-phone” era), and we all have silicon chips implanted into our temporal lobe, allowing us to send sms messages by thinking a certain algorithm.

Yes, it is a dark vision, that the future of humans may look more like “Wall-E” than “Terminator.” We have no use for cyborgs, when it is much trendier to turn yourself into an android. We can entertain ourselves with unlimited access to the cloud, and no battery life to slow us down.

The brain itself is the next open-source platform.