Tim’s Disruptive Technologies

Ok, so that Tim Boucher, from timboucher.com was going on about disruptive technologies that are likely to turn up and I thought I’d make a few of my own. Or just sortof heckle. Or whatever.

Firstly, Tim’s were:

1) AUGMENTED REALITY

(probably not – could be good for shopping. Good for meta-tagging reality. Could raise monster privacy issues if face-recognition is linked to late-night facebook page rantings etc. Ok… maybe it will be then. Most of the apps I’ve seen so far have been “concepts” though, and a bit crap. Apart from that google one maybe – with that weird bloke with the savagely repressed hair. That’s disruptive. You could go into a shop to try something out, then buy it off ebay on the spot)

2) UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

(absolutely – it will get into our electricity and heartbeat-rate. Like all of these things, a two-edged sword from a privacy POV)

3) FREE-FLOATING HOLOGRAMS

(probably not, but if you can use them for porn, then they might be quite popular)

4) GESTURAL & KINESTHETIC INTERFACES

(Waving Arms Around Interfaces – utter bollocks. Useful for games maybe. The main reason people like these though is like transparent screens, they turn up in sci-fi movies all the time – but they don’t do that because they’re useful but because they’re photogenic. Eyeball tracking is an interesting one though)

5) MIND-TO-COMPUTER INTERFACE

(what would this allow us to do that we don’t already do? There was that thing where people controlled revolving cubes on a screen recently… so you could theoretically control a mouse pointer or a RC plane… but… Dragon Dictate hasn’t really taken off because you can’t talk and think at the same time – when you type you can think ahead about what you’re going to say next. Being able to suck information off the web “internally” could make it a hell of a lot easier to cheat in exams though.

And a major factor in a computer’s physical size right now is the fact that human fingers are the size they are. Get rid of a keyboard and a screen and you could conceivably get away with networked smart-dust)

6) FULLY-CARTOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE

(an extrapolation of a current tendency… but who would want it? Us I suppose. We would want it. Total recall)

7) INTER-LINKED SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS

(Already happening – there was that Australian port-surveillance system recently. I think this one is quite interesting because it allows us all to become ghosts in the machine)

8) SUPER-PROFILE

(also already happening… but I think this creates a niche that facebook used to provide but now fail to, which Diaspora aim to fill… but chances are won’t – unless they have the magic-bullet of being able to seamlessly leach off facebook’s info… it offers a niche for shared private spaces. Sorry… teenagers need them. Adults need them. We’re too complicated to have only one persona for all people. We just are)

9) PERSONALITY CLONING & SIMULATION

(really? Hadn’t thought of that one. It would be interesting to meet your clone, but… the psychological/psychiatric ramifications of saving the personalities of dead people are possibly a little too severe – prolonging the agony of loss etc. Could be useful for extending the lives of actors though. Maybe)

10) DISPOSABLE IDENTITIES

(already happening – you can get email addresses that only last a couple of hours)

11) COLLECTIVE IDENTITY SYSTEMS

(I’m not sure that this isn’t already happening to the extent that it will)

12) REMOTE PRESENCE

(yup – absolutely. Holidays from hell. Backyard spider-hunting safaris)

13) KILLER ROBOTS

(yup – already happening. Drone attacks are the only game in town when it comes to killing forn terrsts)

14) AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCES

(I think these are miss-imagined. People think of something like Orac of Blakes 7 – but it’s more likely to be things like smart-thermostats escaping from the hot-water-cupboard – roombas etc. I guess the dividing-line is something that uses genetic algorithms so it can deal with entirely new situations based upon experience, or trial-and-error. This raises the spectre of computer virii escaping from the network and learning how to control a roomba. Or a car. Or a killer robot)

15) UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

(nah, everyone will learn to speak English – as well as their own languages – it’ll take a generation or so, but it will happen. To a large extent this is already the case… and it hasn’t really disrupted that much I don’t think. Not compared to the technology that’s made it happen. But… you know, we can talk to each other, but I’m not sure we’re really listening to each other yet – not really)

16) MINIFACTURING

(Oh yes. If this does what I think it’s going to do, then disruptive is too small a word)

Ok – that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would, so I’ll do a follow up post on the morrow, which will be my version of the same thing.