If you were halfway to work and you realized you left your cell phone at home, would you turn around to get it even if it meant you'd be late?
It is strange to see the old movies and TV shows where characters use landline phones, especially pay phones. It reminds us that so much more than fashion has changed. Time and space are different. People gave directions and used paper maps. We looked things up in paper encyclopedias, which were expensive and kept in public buildings called libraries. We made idle talk with strangers at bus stops. At the same time, something deeper changed in the way we relate to each other, disrupting even the relationship between parents and children. We are less present, but available on demand.
When I started out in the movie business in the 1980s we used fifty-year-old technology. The telephone was the only tool most businesses had. In fact, millions of people were employed "to handle the phones." Americans went to the moon on the slide rule. Yet less than 100 years before, the vast majority of humans never traveled more than ten miles from where they were born. Men still owned other men.
In eight generations we have gone from cavemen to star-traveling magicians. In the context of the 125,000 generations that came before us, that is astounding. It is the ultimate hockey stick.
Now we each carry a $1,000 brick "brain" that contains our most valued possessions. Though the content may be stored in the cloud, the access to it, the interface, is in our hands. We look into our hand hundreds of times a day. It hard not to, honestly, it has access to all the information in the world and to everyone we know in the world. When was the last time you didn’t know something?
We are constantly shifting between the world in our hands and the physical world. Tens of thousands of people die every year because of this incredibly bad form factor, and the need to change it is urgent. It took 15 years to dig this hole, and it will take 15 years to dig out, but when we do, it's going to be a very different world because augmentation is happening at many other levels, AI, the blockchain, cloud computing, are also rapidly changing computing. And then there are the unintended consequences of our greatest inventions, like Facebook, which may better connect us, but also make us less free.
Pattie Maes of the Media Lab really influenced my thinking about AR and how this tool is going change humankind. Well known for her compelling TED talks, at the “AR in Action” conference at MIT January 17, 2017, she gave a mesmerizing big picture presentation on the state of modern life: living simultaneously, imperfectly and superficially in the real and digital worlds, multitasking, continually interrupting ourselves by checking our smartphones 100+ times a day.
“Tech has become part of us,” she said, “and we all know there is no going back. Instead, we need to make our integration with technology more seamless. In the short term, our technology is making us less mindful and attentive, but in the long term, it will make us much, much better. Better learners, better workers, better able to reach our potential. We will become augmented. Cyborgs.” Many of the Media Lab’s forward-thinking projects seek to accomplish human augmentation with wearables, biometric scent dispensers, and even tattoos. I always thought VR meditation was utter new age bullshit, but when Maes showed how we can use brainwaves to levitate and move objects in a 3D digital world, I shed my cynical disbelief.
Most mobile phones already do a form of augmented reality, expressed in the simplest form, with stickers and filters that can be mingled with the real world. Apple's new operating system enables the phone's camera to become the interface, a window through which you view the world, where the real and digital can be mixed. But holding your arm out is ridiculous, unnatural and uncomfortable. It’s the worst form factor ever accidentally invented by man, and if the app is useful, it makes your arm hurt. It's not sustainable.
"A head-mounted display would be just a waypoint, as we will continue to evolve beyond it on our march toward human-machine integration,” Maes told me in a recent email.
The goal is to get this information into the brain. Right now, the eyes and the ears are the only ways into the brain. “Computing interfaces will become more and more invisible to the user/wearer" says Will Schumaker, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University whose focus is optics. "But going beyond HMDs will be tricky and require quantum leaps in optics or biotech, which might take some time.”
Schumaker says bio-augmentation is more than science fiction, though still far from science fact. “Digital contact lenses or interocular devices that might be directly implanted with a lasik-like procedure require technology that hasn’t been invented yet. There’s been some work with contacts, but everything has to go into a wafer the thickness of an eyelash. I think they can get a Twitter feed’s worth of data into them.”
Think about how useful this could be when (not if) the form factor could be solved, and if the data in the lens could geo-locate and then seamlessly negotiate contextually relevant with social networks, literally right before our eyes. A digital AI, perhaps Alexa, will have a dimensional presence nearby on command. Everything controlled by voice and gesture. A depth-detecting camera with facial recognition could allow you to identify social contacts in public places. Imagine walking down a city street, every billboard a portal, every storefront the store, every restaurant rated by social contacts. Of course, this reality may not make us happier, but it will make what we already do better and faster.
Neuralink Corp. is a startup co-founded earlier this year by billionaire Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and Space X. Musk disclosed he has invested 27M in Neuralink, a company that implants electrodes into the brain in order to create a "neural lace", the ultimate man-machine interface. It may be decades away, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. Medical devices are implanted today to treat certain diseases like Parkinson's.
Of this we can be certain, our marriage to the handheld smartphone and the terrible form factors associated with it will eventually come to an end. Headsets, fashionable as Snap Specs, will be capable of more and more. Handsets will do less. All that may be left is a Bluetooth keyboard. The 3-year mobile upgrade cycle will continue. Augmented glasses, like the personal computer, won’t be for everyone until they are.
Man will be augmented. Man will merge with machines to become cyborgs. Always on. Always connected. Continuously updated. It sounds like science fiction, but it's already happening. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be timed. It cannot be resisted. It might not be all good. “The law of unintended consequences can be profound in this area,” Schumaker warned, “the benefits of this technology will not be shared equally.”
"The Augmented Man and The Inevitability of HMDs" is part of Charlie Fink's Metaverse, a continuously updated AR-enabled guide to VR and AR, which will be released on 1/8 at CES. Follow me on Twitter @CharlieFink for updates.
