Walking down 2020

When I was younger (probably in middle school) I thought the coolest job in the world would be to get paid to sit around and think of cool new things. I was not aware that this job actually existed, but law and behold, Jamais Cascio has it. I may need to have a word with my high school college-advisor.

Doesn’t that sound like a cool job? Futurist. Do you include that on your business card? In any case, I know he does more than just sit and think – probably does extensive research and a bunch of other things as well.

I read two articles that just loved today. The first one was precisely about an interview with Cascio. My favorite snippet:

The internet in 2020 will be “indistinguishable from the physical world. Everything and everyone you see around you will have a simultaneous physical and digital instantiations. You can think of it in terms of augmented reality with glasses or contact lenses.”

“So, 2020: We have our augmented reality system saying, "Hi, this is Alexis and I know him through XYZ." How do I get somewhere? A path pops up like a Google map. At a glance, I can see environmental information. Oh, it's raining? How much has it rained? What's the pollen count? What's the forecast? All of these bits and pieces of how we appreciate the world around us will be given greater specificity and made graspable.”

The second was a post on “The future of social networks” by Charlene Li.

“I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.”

The “augmented reality with glasses or contact lenses” description got me thinking about such a future. However, I think that, more relevant than directions or environmental information (after all, I can sort of tell if it’s raining if I am walking outside), will be the information that can be derived from social graphs and used in a practical way and in real time.

For instance, you are walking down the street wearing your futuristic glasses. You see a restaurant you have not yet been to and automatically the glasses provide you with information about the ratings your social network has given the establishment, the dishes your friends liked the most, the name of the waitress you should ask for, etc. With a blink of an eye you dismiss the message and proceed to walk in.

Take it further -- All of a sudden you are dumbstruck by this gorgeous girl walking down the street. Your shirt picks up the acceleration in your palpitations and relays the information to your glasses. The glasses themselves notice the dilution of your pupils. Immediately the glasses search for any connection you might have with her. They pull up the information: there are two degrees of separation between the two of you. Furthermore, the girl has set her status as single. Your glasses make a note this and suggest a few approaches. 1) send her a digital message, 2) call up your contact to see if he/she can fix a meeting, 3) walk up and say hi. If you choose to pick the third option, your glasses will naturally be able to generate a creative ice-breaker with the optimal probability of success given the information available about the girl and how you present yourself under stress situations.

Third and final example (and I know I’m rambling at this point). You witness an accident; a man has just been run over. You are the closest witness -- information which is promptly relayed to the police. At the same time your glasses automatically transfer you to an emergency line where an operator explains what you should do in order to help the injured person.

I agree with Cascio; the future of the internet is an intermeshing with the real world. Something he didn’t mention in the interview, however, is the role of genetics in this future. I think genetic information is going to play a huge role. What comes to mind is the investment Google made in 23andme.

The benefits that the internet has on education are well understood, but I think genetic information may take it to a whole new level. Now I’m no biologist, but I wonder if genes can suggest what forms of learning are optimal for an individual. Am I more of a visual learner? What kind of contextual information suits me best? If genes can tell us this, then they will revolutionize education.

What if our futuristic glasses had access to our genetic information? Well, they could tell us what to eat or not to eat given our genes, our current metabolic state, and the food intake we have had in the past 24 hours.