we don’t have cars anymore (at least we don’t own one…)
we run around with a WLAN router in the middle of a park and our all-knowing artificial assistent is nagging us while we spend quality time with our children
we order customized cars out of thin air like we’d phone for a taxi today
our “car of the moment” is following us, waiting for us and is “thinking ahead” because it’s supposedly more intelligent than our best human assistants are today
This has also been described very well and highly entertaining in the near-future thriller “Rainbows End” by Vernor Vinge among dozens of other visionary things
Web pages turned into a web of data and the future illustrated in the movie Minority Report is nearly there. This is an annotated slideshow of a presentation that Matt Jones (Dopplr.com) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse) gave back in April at the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco (watch fullscreen). It’s quite long and in the end more and more interesting only to user interface designers, but the first 35 slides (yeah I know) cover topics like ubiquitious computing and what Wired founder Kevin Kelly called “personal informatics” (think Minority Report) with many excellent examples that are not science-fiction but available today “and for less than 30 US$”. Personally I can’t wait until my adidas sneakers finally start talking to all the homeless Volkswagens, probably arguing about who is supposed to be taking me home (after checking with my bathroom scale to see how I’m doing on the health front…). Well and if Matt and Tom have their say, our devices will be polite (respecting our prefs, privacy and being transparent), pertinent (telling us about our empty fridge while standing in front of an open supermarket) and pretty: why shouldn’t interfaces to the networked devices and web services of our future not be as beautiful as they can be? I just hope my iPhone earring will be blogging by itself by then, knowing what I’d want to share from talking to my neuroimplant in the amygdalae.
“ At a certain point in the future (…) the smarter, faster, smarter, faster cycle will have allowed us to remake aspects of our world - and, potentially, ourselves - in ways that would astonish, confuse, and maybe even frighten earlier generations. To those of us imagining this point in the future, it’s a dramatic transformation; to those folks living through that future point, it’s the banality of the everyday.
About Singularity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, your decision. Open the Future: Singular Sensations
Your life will be flashed before your eyes. Prototype contact lenses that include LEDs and circuits could become a tiny personal display. Think augmented reality, such as superimposing text messages or direction arrows on your view of the world. It’s coming… Technology | The Guardian
There’s life in the old dog yet. Social media and virtual worlds Second Life and Club Penguin are growing, and it’s official. Recently published data from Nielsen Online, reported on by Net Imperative shows the surfing destinations of UK residents. The research covers the period May 2007 - May 2008. The top ten (in total minutes) include two social networks (Facebook and Bebo) two email sites (Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) and two media players (Windows Media Player and iTunes). Read more here: Club Penguin and Second Life make it into top 10 fastest growing UK sites : Kzero
