Chapter 10: Doing the Impossible

The Future of Telecommunications in Six Videos

On Tuesday, I am traveling to Florida to give a speech on the future of the telecommunications industry. One of the bigger (and, to be honest, not terribly new) trends in the field is the continued growth of video. In the spirit of this trend, I’d like to offer you six different videos which, each in its own unique way, offers a glimpse into the future of the telecommunications industry. The first three are very cool, and the next three are more technical but still provide some very good information.

The first clip from Nokia offers an idea of what future mobile devices might look like:

The second offers an idea of how holographic information might become more pervasive:

The third video reviews how advances in algorithms and nerotechnology could lead to “voiceless” communication:

The next three clips review how terahertz transmissions, sensors and RFID technology could lead to some cool new applications for future mobile devices:

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The Future is Coming to a (Holograph) Screen Near You!

In the 2001 movie, The Minority Report (which supposedly took place in the year 2050), one of the cooler scenes had Tom Cruise’s character interacting in real-time with a holograph. Well, that future is now a lot closer than the year 2050. I invite you to watch this short video:

As this technology continues to improve, it will likely impact everything from how we communicate and interact with advertisements to how we teach our children and entertain ourselves.

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Robots Score! Do Humans Lose?

The other day I discussed why the field of robotics is advancing at an accelerating rate. To add some visual evidence to this thesis, I encourage you to watch this short, 15-second video demonstrating how a robot is now regularly beating the world’s best air-hockey players:

Undoubtedly, the idea of a robot beating a human at something as trivial as air hockey might elicit nothing more than a collective yawn from the masses, but I’d like to suggest that this is a serious issue that society needs to come to grips with now. If a robot can beat a human at air hockey, why can’t it also build a house or clear away garbage (ala the latest movie sensation, Wall-e)?

The answer is that robots will soon be able to do these tasks, as well as a variety of others, which were once considered the sole domain of humans. The resulting displacement of human labor is sure to cause a severe backlash among those put out of work. The time to begin thinking of how to retrain these workers for new careers in the 21st century is now.

Interested in some other future-related posts about robots? Check out these recent posts:

Learn from Robots
Meet Your Future, Shape-Shiting Robotic Butler
Hospitals Robotic Future
Will Robots Have Tails?
Is the Future of an ATV a Robot
The Robot Will See You Now

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Keep Your Mind’s Eye on Cybernetics

Imagine sitting in your home and being able to control a device in a different room, a different city or even a different country by thought alone. Sounds impossible doesn’t it? Well, accordingly to this fascinating article from Popular Mechanics, advances in the field of cybernetics are occurring so rapidly that such things may be possible in the not-too-distant future.

Consider this: a monkey in North Carolina can already send a signal to Japan (where it controls a robot) faster than it can send a message from its brain to its own muscles. One immediate practical application of this technology may occur in the field of surgery whereby a surgeon could control a small robotic device faster and more precisely than she could move her hand. In a field like brain surgery such a distinction could make a big difference.

It will be some time before other cybernetic devices move into the mainstream, but it is interesting to consider how such mind-machine devices may change how we perceive and interact with our environment in the future. For example, imagine being able to control a robot by thought alone. Forget to feed your dog this morning, just “think” your bot to do it. Forget to water the plants or turn off the iron? Not a problem. A solution is just a thought away.

Other potential uses, of course, go well beyond these pedantic applications; but it is worth thinking about these things because as the Popular Mechanics articles suggests “the big breaks [in the field of cybernetic] can come faster than expected.” And, as Louis Pasteur, famously said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This will be especially true when the mind can control things better and faster than the body can react.

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Robots Advance

Last week, I explained how humans might soon be learning things from robots. Today, I’d like to explain why robots might become a more integral part of life faster than most people expect.

Yesterday, Technology Review published an interesting article entitled: ”Robots Learns to Use Tools.” What is really intriguing about the article, which describes a new robot called the UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan for short, is that the robot is employing sophisticated algorithms to teach itself how to deal with unfamiliar objects.

One of the major barriers to date with robotics is that programmers have had to write complicated software code to help robots deal with almost every contingency that it might encounter. For example, for a household robot to be effective, it needs to recognize every item that might conceivably be in someone house—everything from a pair of scissors to a flower vase. This is no easy chore.

In the near future, however, robots need not necessarily know how to handle every object; they merely need to learn how to deal with that object in an
appropriate fashion. Using the scissors as example, UMan can study the device and then can tinker with the blades until it understands how they are connected and how the object operates. Presumably, the robot will then know that it would be inappropriate to “run with scissors.”

The implications of self-learning robots could be quite profound—especially if they can learn faster than humans. For instance, if they can recognize and learn how things operate, they might be finally able to practical household servants—ala Rosie the Robot in the Jetson’s. They could also become more practical instruments in the agricultural industry if they can determine between which fruit or vegetable is ready to be picked or whether it needs to stay on the vine a little longer. Similarly, robots will become more effective warriors in battlefield situations if they can rapidly adapt to the enemy’s changing behavior; and there is no reason why they can’t soon be used in a variety of other fields, including the construction industry and the health care industry.

Interested in some other future-related posts about robots? Check out these recent posts:

Learn from Robots
Meet Your Future, Shape-Shiting Robotic Butler
Hospitals Robotic Future
Will Robots Have Tails?
Is the Future of an ATV a Robot
The Robot Will See You Now

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Unlearning Death

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin—then one of the world’s brightest men and most accomplished scientists—declared heavier than air machines to be “impossible.”

He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.

A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he theorized that aging is a disease and should be treated as such.

The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord Kelvin’s reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even declared that de Grey’s idea was “so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community.”

Well, according to this article in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within scientific circles.

To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey’s goal of ending again but, as I have written before, I’d encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely. For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many ideas which it now holds as dear.

In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of “death as an inevitability” could make other past historic paradigm shifts—such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the universe (an idea for which Aristarchus was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin’s theory of evolution—look like child’s play.

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The Future of Reading

Reading. Most of us do it every day and it is so ingrained from such an early age that it is difficult to imagine that there is another way of doing it. Yet, there is.

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Adam Gordon, the vice president of marketing for Live Ink, to discuss his company’s revolutionary new technology—Live Ink.

Before explaining the technology, however, have you ever wondered why we read the way we do? That is, why do we read words in block text—such as you are doing at this very moment.

I am no historical scholar but I suspect the answer goes back thousands of years and it is partly dependent on writers need to make efficient use of limited resources. First, stone tablets; then papyrus and, ultimately, pulp-based paper.

In much the same way that the QWERTY keyboard has become the de facto way we write on computers —even though it has been demonstrated that there are more efficient and faster methods of typing -- the same can be said for how we read. But instead of dealing with one hundred years of established tradition—as in the case of QWERTY keyboard—printed text in block form has been around since Johannes Gutenberg printed off his first bible.

In the near future, however, the resistance to this long-held paradigm will begin to fade. I am not suggesting that printed block text will fade away overnight, but a convergence of technologies has now created an environment in which a different method of how we access the written word has been created.

Before I go any further let me first invite you to view a visual demonstration of Live Ink’s technology here. In its simpliest form, Live Ink displays text in shorter lines; breaks the text into grammatically meaningful segments; and then indents the text to cue the brain to key phrases within a given sentence.

What immediately appealed to me about Live Ink’s technology was the notion that written text as it was historically formatted was not optimized for the human mind. In other words, while it is true that we can read long line-by-line text that does not imply that it is necessarily the best way for the human eye to operate or for the human mind to comprehend written information.

Until recently there wasn’t much that could be done about this shortcoming. To make books compact and conserve limited resources, it helped to cram as many words onto a page as possible. Today, however, as ever more people access digital information on the Web; from their cellphones; Kindle-like electronic books; and, soon, other flexible electronic media, it will make sense to display information not as “we have always done it,” but rather in a manner that is easiest, fastest and allows us to retain the most information.

Company executives don’t make any claims that their technology improves the rate at which people read; they have, however, documented how their technology dramatically increases reading comprehension rates and eases strain on the eye.

I cannot often say with a strong conviction that I have seen the future; but, in the case of Live Ink, I truly believe I have seen the future of reading. Within months, I fully expect my website—and thousands of others—to begin placing a widget on their site that will allow readers to access written information in a new, faster and more efficient manner.

(For the record, I am in no way involved with or have a financial interest in Live Ink.)

Related Posts by Jack Uldrich:

Paper Industry Needs to Turn a New Page

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“Unusually Rapid Improvements” Will Become Usual

It was reported last week that US life expectancy topped 78 years as a variety of diseases—including heart disease, diabetes and flu—decreased this past year.

More interestingly, life expectancy—which has been increasing about two or three months from year to year—jumped an impressive four months this year. This caused one demographer to note that the increase was “an unusually rapid improvement.”

It was “an usually rapid improvement,” but I’d like to argue that such rapid improvements will become “usual” for the foreseeable future. If one tracks the amazing rate of progress in biotechnology, genomics, stem cell research and nanotechnology; it is hard—barring a devastating calamity that kills thousands or millions of people—to envision how life expectancy will do anything but continue to increase at an accelerating rate.

At a minimum, given the existing pressure on such social programs as Social Security and Medicare, it seems only prudent that we should at least begin preparing for life expectancies in the neighborhood of 100 within the next few decades. 

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BMW Jumps the Curve

The German automaker BMW, in introducing its new “Light Visionary Model” prototype—which it dubs GINA (Geometry and Functions “N” Adaptions")—writes this: ”The key to affecting the development of tomorrow’s mobility lies in our readiness to challenge what is established and in the ability to present new options.” In short, BMW is jumping the curve and embracing the future.

Watch the short video below and notice how doors and hoods no longer open (they fold and zip open) and how the lights do open (much like human eyes), I think you’ll agree that the benefits of jumping the curve could give BMW a very distinct competitive advantage as it boldly moves into the future.

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Reach for a New Future

Building off my two last posts --- AI: Getting Better All the Time & Why Mind Over Matter Matters -- I’d ecourage you to check out this amazing video. If a person can already contol a robotic prosthetic arm this well today, just image what we’ll be able to do tomorrow.

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Artificial Intelligence: It’s Getting Better All the Time

A couple of newsworthy piece have gotten me to thinking about the Beatles’ hit song, “It’s getting better all the time.” The two articles that triggered the connection to the songs’ lyrics are both related to rapidly emerging field of artificial intelligence and I think the saying “getting better all the time” is a phrase we all need to keep in mind as we move into the future.

The first article discusses how intelligent computers can now “see” human traits with an impressive success rate of 82%. In other words, a computer can, with a good degree of confidence, now tell if you are happy, sad, angry or confused. (By way of comparison, I can only wish I was half as accurate in assessing my wife’s many moods.)

At a minimum this suggests that artifical intelligence will become an even more integral component in a host of daily activities, including customer service, computer games and educational software, than it already is. Imagine, for instance, if an educational computer system could tell if a child was confused about a certain concept in biology and then reexplain it to him or her in a way that the child could understand. This compelling future is on the way because such computers are, in fact, “getting better all the time.”

The same is true with regard to computer models that can now predict what word you are thinking. This article discusses the work researchers at Carnegie Mellon are now doing in applying fMRI technology to scan the brains of users. Although the computer model currently only tests for 60 words and is just 75% accurate it, too, is “getting better all the time.”

Now consider what will be possible when artifical intelligence can create a computer that can not only read our facial expressions but also our minds. It almost blows your mind, doesn’t it?

No? Then perhaps this article, entitled ”Scheme to Let Robot Take Over Brain-Computer Interface” will. It discusses how researchers at CalTech have created a miniature robot which is using sophisticated algorithms to more effectively place brain-neural chips inside the brain.

As one researcher says, “the idea of actually putting this in the human brain is far off,” but both the underlying robotic technology and algorithmic software are “getting better all the time.” It is only a matter of time before computers can really get inside your head.

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Why Mind Over Matter … Matters

Yesterday, the journal Nature reported researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine had successfully tested a robotic arm which was controlled using only the signals from a monkey’s arm. (A good overview of the technology can be read in this article: ”Mind over Matter: Monkey Feeds tself using its Brain”.)

The test was not the first such test but it does suggest that the technology is getting better and will likely someday soon be used to aide people with spinal cord injuries or other debilitating diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease or MS.

I would, however, encourage people to think beyond these immediate applcations. Michael Berger of Nanowerk recently had a very thoughtful—and thought-provoking—piece entitled Nanotechnology, transhumanism and the bionic man, in which he discusses how technologies which were initially created for the disabled could become a platform for “the acceptance of transhumanist ideas and products.”

He is right and the aforementioned brain-neural technology is a perfect case in point. In the beginning, it will be sold as a tool for the disabled but as the technology continues to improve it will eventually be viewed by some people (but not all) as a way to perform at a higher level—both mentally and physically. I discussed this idea briefly in this piece entitled ”