The alarm goes off at 6 am. You extend a sleepy arm and hit the snooze button and lapse back into sleep. Sleep is especially delicious after that. 'Just five minutes', you tell yourself. The next thing you know, you are late for work. This is a routine familiar to many of us. But now you can break it, thanks to Pavlok, the tough new personal coach which promises to help you change your habits. With this around your wrist, you had better quickly jump out of bed when the alarm goes off. If you do not, be prepared to receive a jolt of electric shock. Pavlok promises to help you shake off negative habits and whip you into shape. The threat of corporal punishment and public shame (Pavlok will expose your transgressions in social media) are guaranteed to transform you. If not, I wonder what will.
If you need Pavlok to keep you from becoming lazy, you might not want to indulge in Google Glass. With Google glass, one does not even have to pick up the phone and 'thumb' through the screen. All one has to do is squint obliquely, perhaps looking a little demented, and one can read the latest tweet or email or message. I am sure the next version will enable the user to look straight into the glass. Then someone could look at you and yet not be looking at you. And if that person starts laughing suddenly, it may have nothing to do with you. He or she is probably just watching something on the internet. But I am really not sure why we need this gadget. Watch Daily Show - Google Glass where some users try to explain the utility of the glass to hilarious effect.
Wearable Tech devices or 'Tech-Jewelry' as I would like to call them, are commonplace now. When blue tooth devices first appeared, it took us a while to get used to seeing people walking about with the little light glowing on their earpieces, looking a little futuristic. But now we hardly bat an eyelid when we see people talking to thin air. They are also free to gesticulate and many do which makes for some comic relief.
Perhaps we have become so indolent, not only physically but mentally too that we have accepted we are incapable of making simple decisions. There is something disturbing about the idea that we need gadgets to program our life, to get us to exercise, to eat healthy, to remind us to drink water, etc. etc. Nothing illustrates this better than Vessyl. You can think of it as the Holy Grail of nifty devices. This genius cup can tell you what you have poured into it. Yes, that's right. You pour coffee into it and in a second, it will display that fact back to you. It will keep tabs on how much you consume in fluids and calories from them. This segment from the Colbert Report sums it up beautifully.
It seems to me that we have a reached a certain crossroads in our evolution. I have often wondered if human beings were evolving what the next stage would be. I would not care to make a prediction but there is perhaps a clue in the tech-jewelry that we are now seeing. From Google Glass to Pavlok - there is a trend that is pushing technology closer and closer to our bodies. And people seem all too eager to embrace all this. Evidently, they are convinced that they need to program their daily lives using technology. In fact, many of the pre-launch offers for new devices are snapped up quickly.
For the longest time we have been trying to create intelligent robots. But it appears that it is easier to program intelligent beings into robots than the other way around.
Even as tech-jewelry is gaining in popularity, another frontier has opened up - Tech Implants. I guess implants are just the next logical step. While there are many applications for such devices, we may be headed towards a brave new world where our brains are connected to chips that enhance our capabilities in some fashion. Imagine accessing the worldwide web without wires and communicating using just our thoughts. We can listen to music and watch movies entirely inside our heads. But there is also the real possibility of our brains being hacked and manipulated. Will others be able to read our thoughts then? I don't think I want to be online in such a literal sense! I shudder at the possibility but the way people are willing to share their personal life on social media, it is probably not worth the hacker's effort.
I do think many will draw the line at being hacked by others. But there are plenty of people willing to hack into their own bodies to make them 'optimal'. Biohacking is the latest trend. Wikipedia defines it as follows: "Biohacking is the practice of engaging biology with the hacker ethic. Biohacking encompasses a wide spectrum of practices and movements ranging from "Grinders" who design and install do-it-yourself body-enhancements such as magnetic implants to do-it-yourself biologists who conduct at-home gene sequencing". I don't know about you, but to me, this is a scary prospect. I tend to think that the human body has been designed to be self-reliant. There are many processes inside that are autonomous but usually these are best left alone. I would worry that attempts to modify one function may have unintended consequences elsewhere just like prescription drugs which carry the risk of dangerous side effects. Sometimes the remedy seems worse than the disease itself.
Where will all this take us? If everyone gets an implant, can I afford to remain unhacked? Will I be able to distinguish those with implants from others? Will such technology remove the essential 'human' quality in us? If the past is any guide, a new technology usually leads the full analysis of its potential impact. But if you don't know what to make of all these new developments, relax. I am sure you can always get a chip implanted on your brain which will tell you what to think. And then you can sing with Pink Floyd (Brain Damage - Dark Side of The Moon): "There's someone in my head but it's not me" and mean it literally.
If you need Pavlok to keep you from becoming lazy, you might not want to indulge in Google Glass. With Google glass, one does not even have to pick up the phone and 'thumb' through the screen. All one has to do is squint obliquely, perhaps looking a little demented, and one can read the latest tweet or email or message. I am sure the next version will enable the user to look straight into the glass. Then someone could look at you and yet not be looking at you. And if that person starts laughing suddenly, it may have nothing to do with you. He or she is probably just watching something on the internet. But I am really not sure why we need this gadget. Watch Daily Show - Google Glass where some users try to explain the utility of the glass to hilarious effect.
Wearable Tech devices or 'Tech-Jewelry' as I would like to call them, are commonplace now. When blue tooth devices first appeared, it took us a while to get used to seeing people walking about with the little light glowing on their earpieces, looking a little futuristic. But now we hardly bat an eyelid when we see people talking to thin air. They are also free to gesticulate and many do which makes for some comic relief.
Perhaps we have become so indolent, not only physically but mentally too that we have accepted we are incapable of making simple decisions. There is something disturbing about the idea that we need gadgets to program our life, to get us to exercise, to eat healthy, to remind us to drink water, etc. etc. Nothing illustrates this better than Vessyl. You can think of it as the Holy Grail of nifty devices. This genius cup can tell you what you have poured into it. Yes, that's right. You pour coffee into it and in a second, it will display that fact back to you. It will keep tabs on how much you consume in fluids and calories from them. This segment from the Colbert Report sums it up beautifully.
It seems to me that we have a reached a certain crossroads in our evolution. I have often wondered if human beings were evolving what the next stage would be. I would not care to make a prediction but there is perhaps a clue in the tech-jewelry that we are now seeing. From Google Glass to Pavlok - there is a trend that is pushing technology closer and closer to our bodies. And people seem all too eager to embrace all this. Evidently, they are convinced that they need to program their daily lives using technology. In fact, many of the pre-launch offers for new devices are snapped up quickly.
For the longest time we have been trying to create intelligent robots. But it appears that it is easier to program intelligent beings into robots than the other way around.
I do think many will draw the line at being hacked by others. But there are plenty of people willing to hack into their own bodies to make them 'optimal'. Biohacking is the latest trend. Wikipedia defines it as follows: "Biohacking is the practice of engaging biology with the hacker ethic. Biohacking encompasses a wide spectrum of practices and movements ranging from "Grinders" who design and install do-it-yourself body-enhancements such as magnetic implants to do-it-yourself biologists who conduct at-home gene sequencing". I don't know about you, but to me, this is a scary prospect. I tend to think that the human body has been designed to be self-reliant. There are many processes inside that are autonomous but usually these are best left alone. I would worry that attempts to modify one function may have unintended consequences elsewhere just like prescription drugs which carry the risk of dangerous side effects. Sometimes the remedy seems worse than the disease itself.
Where will all this take us? If everyone gets an implant, can I afford to remain unhacked? Will I be able to distinguish those with implants from others? Will such technology remove the essential 'human' quality in us? If the past is any guide, a new technology usually leads the full analysis of its potential impact. But if you don't know what to make of all these new developments, relax. I am sure you can always get a chip implanted on your brain which will tell you what to think. And then you can sing with Pink Floyd (Brain Damage - Dark Side of The Moon): "There's someone in my head but it's not me" and mean it literally.
