We’re Suffering Through the Awkward Age of Technology
Sometimes you see the latest smartwatch, smartphone, or smartcar and think “Boy, the future is now!” Well, you’re wrong. The future is soon, it’s coming, but it sure is hell isn’t now. Yes we have things like Google Glass and chair pants, but these things are all still getting their kinks worked out. They show promise of where we could be or where we will be, but they’re still clunky, slow, and just not quite there yet. Here are some awkward items that prove we’re in technology’s awkward age.
The Tangible Media Group at MIT’s Media Lab has unveiled a futuristic display made of atoms,… Read more Read more
What it is: The inFORM is a shape-shifting surface that can take form and be manipulated by someone hundreds of miles away. Imagine holding your hands under your iPad, and the inFORM taking their shape at the completely different location where you could roll a ball, physically flip someone off, or (have thousands of tiny plastic pillars) caress your distant lover’s bosom.
The Growing Pains: Don’t start to think this brings an end to your beloved image-based cyber-sexual tendencies just yet. “Programmable matter” is in its primal form, as the inFORM is a humongous contraption nowhere near being commercially available. So you, your son, and your son’s son might as well get used to only looking at boobs on the phone in the bathroom, not digitally dialing up a physical pair of them.
What it is: The Double is a tablet mounted upon a drivable contraption (read: broomstick with wheels). It gives you the opportunity to maneuver the contraption around, while the tablet’s camera displays the world around you. Much like the inFORM, you’ll be able to be places and touch things without having to rip yourself away from the warming glow of your benevolent computer screen.
The Growing Pains: Yes you can hook this puppy up to another iPad and roll your dumb face around the office or museum, but you’re still a face on a screen that will inevitably end up unable to maneuver around the janitor who’s wagging his wiener in front of the camera. If this is the peak of technology, and offices will soon be filled with iPads rolling into each other and down the stairs while their users sit pants-less in their apartments, then all sci-fi authors should be sued for making us believe humans might amount to anything cool.
Companies are trying as hard as they can to convince us that smartphone-based payment systems are… Read more Read more
What it is: Coin, developer of “The Coin,” wants to take all your credit, debit, and membership cards and put them onto one card. You can select which account you want to charge on the card itself, then swipe, and you’re done. Cash, coins, and wretched mobile credit apps are history!
The Growing Pains: Someday physical money will be a thing of the past. Maybe we’ll have barcodes tattooed onto our necks, maybe we’ll have chips implanted into our thumbs, or maybe time will become currency and we’ll live in a horrible dystopia where Justin Timberlake is king. In 2013, however, we still depend on physical representations of money, and there’s no escaping that. The idea of the Coin is great because scanning your phone sounds scary and who needs three credit cards to snort drugs anyway? Despite the fact that Coin in its infinite wisdom will alert you if you leave your Coin card somewhere, let’s not forget the only times you really leave your card somewhere is when you’re stumbling out of the pub at 2 a.m. Nope, better to sit this one out and enjoy the freedom of just ordering a new card without showing your face at that bar ever again, at least until the real future is here and credit cards are completely obsolete.
What it is: The autonomous car is the preeminent gauge of how far into the future we are — it’s the car that drives you to work while you sleep, eat, or in our ideal future: take a nice, long, uninterrupted dump. In three years, Tesla promises to launch an autonomous car.
The Growing Pains: It doesn’t take much to realize how much social, political, and infrastructural upheaval will have to take place before cars are fully autonomous. Tesla’s car will be mostly (90%, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk) autonomous, in that the car will drive itself on long stretches of highway when you’d rather nap or do something less boring than drive. And even then, don’t expect beer-drinkin’ meat-eatin’ Johnny America to buy into driving with robots on the road, not matter how safe they prove. No, this one is going to sit in the legislature a long, long time before we can call it the future.
Qualcomm has done well by the smartphone boom, with a market value that currently tops $120… Read more Read more
What it is: The latest futuristic buzzword, the “Internet of Things,” promises to be the first step towards having a smart house — a house that’s connected to your habits, your mood, and in our ideal future: your unstable pooping schedule. In the future, a smart house means a house that’s teaming with robotic extensions that wash your clothes, carry you to breakfast, and talk to you in sexy British accents.
The Growing Pains: As it stands, the Internet of Things means Wi-Fi-connected appliances that give you the option to open the garage door and preheat the oven from your phone without having to move or talk to anyone else in the house. Right now the Internet of Things is more “Let me start the dishwasher without having to get up,” and less “Let my house cook breakfast as we lay in our anti-gravity sensory restoration tanks.” And if anything, it’s just one more way the NSA will know you look at porn with the lights on. It’s going to be a while before our houses talk to us in sexy British accents, so might as well get used to talking to people.
Originally published at quinmyers.kinja.com.
