What other sorts of things could we do with inSyte? (2)

If you’re in an accident then you can call for help. Telepathically.

Pretty neat.

You’re in a critical meeting and you have transparent access to your engineers back at HQ. Better than that, they are literally attending the meeting through your eyes and ears. Talk about driving efficiency.

You’re about to say something insensitive at a dinner party, your wife doesn’t have to pretend to change the subject or kick you under the table. She just tells you to shut up through your common feed.

Let’s reverse it – how do you protect your thoughts. You don’t want your wife to know that you don’t like her meatballs, or how cute you think the waitress is. Or if she’s telling you about her day you don’t want her to know you’re really watching the ballgame.

So you have to protect your thoughts. OK – no need to reinvent the wheel. One approach might be to leverage so called demilitarized zones. Create DMZs just like we have on networks today.

So only your thoughts that go into the DMZ can be picked up on.

That would be fine for business and for general interactions with people.

But what about your spouse? Is the person you love going to be OK with that? Now you’re hiding your thoughts intentionally?

Could the authorities get a warrant to explore past the DMZ based on the Patriot Act?

Does probable cause enter the equation if the authorities find actual physical proof of premeditation only as a result of reading your thoughts?

Well, if they could prevent another 911 then of course you would want them to.

So – could they insert this into your head to read your thoughts? Beats waterboarding.

I’m sure this would spawn massive legal questions that would make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

What about hackers? Someone could hack into your mind to steal critical information. Business info, credit card, passwords. Or insert, ie push, a nightmare image. Cause a hallucination. Take you into a virtual reality. Maybe during a business meeting. Or a robbery. Or a date.

What other sorts of things could we do with inSyte? (1)

Your world, Connected. We see these taglines for SPs and technology. Because with a smartphone or a PC there are a number of ways to communicate with other people.

Instant Messaging, Skype, Apple’s new Facetime.

In my book, only one person has the screen in his mind.

What happens when everyone has it?

Well, then you’re communicating in real time with other people using the airwaves, using RF.

Invisibly.

You can talk to anyone else on the grid with your thoughts.

The simple notion is that someone IM’s you, you have an IM session in your head.

Ok – so you can IM someone. Big deal. How about skype? Communicating with your friend. Having an actual conversation. Silently. And he sees what you see.

Except that he’s in another room. Or across town. Or across the country. Or across an ocean.

It’s no different then communicating telepathically. Better, actually, because of the video component.

Sounds like impossible science fiction from the fifties, right?

In fact, if you were an observer from the fifties, you would look on incredulously and likely conclude mankind had discovered an innate telepathic ability.

But as we have this discussion, you see it’s just technology.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss what you could do with this ability…

What would inSyte do to personal conversations?

On the one hand, it would raise the level of the discussion because you don’t have to argue or debate about the facts. So it frees us to focus on concepts, ideas.

On the other hand, can you have a simple conversation? Would we be bored with small talk, already a lost art form? Would we constantly check and correct everything anyone else said?

Sort of like Vulcan’s from Star Trek? “Excuse me, Doctor, but that is factually incorrect.”

And what about the continual interruptions? We think crackberry addicts are bad now, what if everyone had inSyte? You’re having a conversation with someone and they get these constant distant looks in their eyes, or they seem to glance down to read the ticker.

Your wife is telling you about her day and you’re smiling and nodding while you’re watching the ballgame in real time in your mind. I mean, how could you resist?

Again – we would need the proper tools to filter out interruptions.

What might this mean for the Economy?

The implications are tremendous. Productivity is the most important metric in economics. Ratio of output over input. Even small improvements dramatically change our lives.

In the seventies and eighties, productivity grew one and a half percent annually in the U.S. Not very robust. In 1980 it was all gloom and doom.

Because nobody saw the PC explosion of the nineties coming. Because we were on the flat part of the exponential improvement curve for computers and IT. So people could not conceive that within 10 years we would be on the steep part of that curve and the technology would explode.

In the early 90’s, fourth gen computers and IT software hit the market and finally the technology was easy to use. Remember Windows 95? Game changer.

And productivity exploded to 4%+

I mean, think about it – how did we even function as a society before spreadsheets and the ability to email attachments?

Today the economy has stalled and productivity is flat. It’s all gloom and doom. But people cannot imagine that right around the corner lies inSyte.

I’m not talking about turning a crank faster on a machine. I’m talking about fundamentally altering the way we all think and work. InSyte can do for the twenties what the computer and IT did for the nineties. Drive productivity gains off the scale.

Because of the improvement of access to information and the ability to communicate.

If you’re better at searches you’ll know more than your Doctor. You literally do a better, faster diagnosis.

To some degree that could be true. But it’s not enough to know something. Experience plays a huge role. It’s not like I can read how to conduct open heart surgery and then go perform an operation. But maybe I could if it were an absolute emergency. Assuming I don’t faint at the sight of blood.

This wouldn’t be like The Matrix – where I download how to fly a helicopter then jump in and take off. But it might help if I were taking flying lessons from a professional.

Relieve me from the burden of memorization – but I still have to develop the muscle memory.

A lot of factors differentiate people way beyond mere information. Sure, you’ve got to have the info to begin with. But how you deal with situations, interact with people, control emotion… those are real attributes that aren’t going away.

OK - we have size, bw, viewing and triggering - now what?

So far all we’ve talked about is searching. But it’s really more than that, isn’t it. Much more.

It’s viewing – in your mind – all the information available on an external screen today. (VFAT)

Video – you could be casually watching a TV show in your mind and also have a split screen to the the video camera you have at your front door, or at your cabin, or at your office.

Or any feed from millions of video cameras connected to the global internet. So you could see anything, anywhere, anytime.

Did you forget the name of the person you’re talking to at a party? Face recognition will tell you their name and their FB page tells you their wife and kid’s names.

You have Augmented Reality. Today with Google Goggles, you look at a building through your smartphone lens and information about the structure will pop up. There are apps that convert Spanish to English. In real time. You would have all of that in your mind now. You look at a building and see blueprints, see the menu items for a restaurant. From a block away. See inside the building if you can find the camera feed.

Read tweets and Facebook posts so you know what people are thinking. Not today’s tweets, but 3^rd and 4^th generation tweets that will bring everything closer to real time.

So you have access to all mankind’s knowledge, you can be all places at all times, see into the hearts of men, and you’re all knowing as you gaze upon the world – or at least your City block.

Sort of like God.

Viewing and Triggering

Today we have “near eye displays” available today from companies like Sharper Image and Vusix. They look a lot like sunglasses and interface to your iphone wirelessly. They range in price from $150 to $10,000.

The more expensive pairs act like sunglasses but they have a little screen in one corner that displays data from your smartphone.

A bit clunky but Moore’s Law will take care of that in time.

Glasses today, contact lenses tomorrow, somehow tied directly to the optic nerve by the end of the decade.

There you go – you’re constantly connected to the net.

All information recorded by man. Right there in your head.

OK – so you can search based on audio. No doubt voice recognition software will support that in 10 years.

Of course, you don’t want to search based only on external stimulae, ie answering other people’s questions.

You want answers to your own questions.

So you need to trigger a search based on a thought. Your thought.

Not too far fetched, there are technologies today that type based on visual queues and thoughts.

Neuro feedback – or Thought Technology – is about EEG based biofeedback where technology responds to your thoughts, to your brain energy and patterns. Pretty rudimentary today. Designed for people who are paralyzed where they can navigate a computer mouse, to some degree. So let’s assume Moore’s Law makes that easy.

That 10 or 20 years from now you can control the micro with a high degree of granularity just by using your thoughts.