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Apple Watch not the SciFi future I was hoping for
Ehhh I'm not sure I would be looking at Apple anymore, Steve Jobs died and Tim Cook is so far proving himself to be no Steve Jobs.Google/Amazon have been making real huge strides in drone/automation tech but as far as consumer tech I would actually say look at Microsoft. Satya Nadella has been great so far, better then Bill Gates, and certainly better then Steve Ballmer.
As far as future tech now...well sort of.
You have the N3DS, which has a 3D screen that displays a 3D image without using 3D glasses by tracking the movements of your eyes. It's still not that great but considering how affordable these are $150 I imagine we will be seeing this more and more in the future on smartphones until AR takes off.
Google Glass...generally according to the few people I know that got it too expensive and kind of a failure it was a neat idea and showing what is to come but ultimately the tech isn't there yet if you know anyone that does have a pair you should check them out it's cool.
Oculus Rift, more of a VR device but can be used for AR too it's primary target right now is video games and the Oculus Rift 1 despite being bulky and suffering from first attempt is generally liked among the people who I know got it. Early reports are the Oculus Rift dk2 is a straight upgrade. If you are in a big town and know a bunch of nerdy engineers someone is going to have a version of the oculus rift.
As far as droning you got the google cars and amazon delivery bots both are being held up by regulation only at this point. Heck if you drive any of the newer cars they will actually actively provide resistance if you try to merge into a lane that already has a car in it. You can still do the action but the steering wheel will provide strong feedback to not do it. If someone tries to merge into you it will also try to push you into the next lane over assuming it doesn't sense anything there either.
I hate the idea of Google Glasses. I don't want random strangers walking around taking pics of my/my area/home, etc.If that's the future, I'll pass. I (and my friends) call GG the "tech you wear if you want to be alone."
I do agree about Tim Cook not being a Steve Jobs. I hope Apple finds an innovator soon.
I dislike Google for its attitude, of which GG is but one example. The company seems to believe that your privacy is theirs to violate at will -- like providing a service to spammers that targets you based on the content of your gmail messages. Oh, but its OK, they say, because it's in the terms and conditions you agreed to when you signed up for a free gmail account. Of course, they rely on that fact that nobody ever reads those terms and conditions, as long as it's free.I have worked in technology all my life (still do web database programming, because my SF novels aren't yet paying the bills); but I am disturbed by the manner in which technology has invaded our lives, most often without our consent.
John wrote: "I dislike Google for its attitude, of which GG is but one example. The company seems to believe that your privacy is theirs to violate at will -- like providing a service to spammers that targets y..."I agree 100%. It's why I refuse to use an android phone and why Google anything is not on my phone. I'm not giving all my data to a freaking search engine!
The always on mentality was actually the main complaint my friends had of the google glass and I think the actual reason for it's failure.
I know a guy who has them. Mainly he liked it because of the status symbol but he can't wear them most places. He was accused of spying at work - so not there. Driving in them will garner a ticket if you're caught around here.
And Samsung smart TV's transmit your every word while you're snuggling up on the sofa...
Hey, we might see full-body transplants in our lifetime.
Apple is also working on an electric car. If they jump into that market with anything that is remotely as good as Tesla's stuff, their adoring fan base will give them another billion dollars overnight. (Ford will make in excess of a billion dollars profit this year on just their F-150, so Apple stands to make a fortune on their established brand name.)Apple is also going all-in on the medical diagnosis side of things with promises of complete privacy. We'll see how they with the second part, but if they can pack medical technology into their smart watches, we'll all have Star Trek tricorders on our wrists in addition to Dick Tracy's video phone.
I fully expect to see completely automated vehicles of every type within the next 10 years, and that it will be illegal to manually operate your own vehicle in certain areas (like NYC) within 20. It might happen even faster, but it will certainly happen within 25 years, which will change everything.
If someone can actually deliver on the promise of all these wonder-batteries we keep hearing about, they will get all the money. Watches, phones, tablets, desktop computers, cars, houses, buildings, even airplanes, will all need them as we shift to an all-electric infrastructure.
I just turned 50. By the time I'm 65 I fully expect to be able to get into my electric auto here in New Hampshire and say, "Visit my cousins in Ohio," and it will drive me there while I read and nap, stopping only when I want it to, not because it needs to be plugged in. If I spring for an electric auto RV, I won't even have to stop if even I ride all the way across the country.
Australia has an increasing number of retirees who travel all around their country for months on end, known as "Gray Nomads". With the advent of all-electric autos, that'll be all of us eventually, because we won't even have to bother with the driving and fueling parts, and we'll have our entire medical history in our watches.
Combine that with Honda's personal robots, we'll also have personal assistants if we're not in perfect health. There will be no reason NOT to visit the Grand Canyon, and the only thing keeping us out will be the wait on the reservations.
If they can figure out non-stupid virtual reality, most of us won't even leave our homes. Ever. The robot assistants can see to our every need, putting away groceries delivered by robocar and administering medications as needed.
I think most people will trade away their privacy for that level of convenience. Especially the 25-and-under set of today. They don't care about privacy NOW. In 25 years when all of this is in place, they won't even think about. ID theft and hacking will still exist, but we'll see it on the news happening to a few unfortunate people per year, the way we see muggings today.
This is a great thread. I agree with most of those above who were disappointed by the Apple watch. I wanted to see another game changer like the iPhone and the iPad. And I know its just a fantasy, but I'm really hoping for not just automated cars, but automated hovercrafts.
Once they have a screen that can unfold or project an image, then watches will become a lot more impressive and desirable.Imagine a watch that can unfold various dimensions of screen, up to tablet size. Super handy that would be. And they are working on it.
It does seem like the trending currency for tech providers is our personal information. Do any of you remember Max Headroom? I'd be like Blank Reg.
Cars that drive themselves would be a great leap forward because I can see it reduce traffic a lot. Drones ... meh. While a personal robot is cool to think about the advancement in AI will take decades before there's one in the house being of real use.
Completing the circle is the invention of the iPhone. It was the gateway to letting people access and send information. Texts, pictures, video chat, etc.
So, now what are people looking for? I see the possibility of 'replicators' like on Star Trek. We have the beginnings with 3D printers. They're functionality is growing. How soon before you can have it make you a shirt, a cup of tea, or who knows what? They're using them to create human tissue for transplants. How hard can it be to make a cup of tea. Maybe we should ask Arthur Dent.
3D printers and desktop biolabs terrify me, honestly. It only takes one kid messing about with his Home RNA Kit to unleash some sort of super-virus that turns us all into fluid-spewing goo. Or worse, some apocalyptic-minded terrorist who doesn't mind erasing the human race along with himself to engineer an airborne version of Ebola.
Christopher wrote: "It does seem like the trending currency for tech providers is our personal information. Do any of you remember Max Headroom? I'd be like Blank Reg.
Cars that drive themselves would be a great le..."
Replicators are wayyy behind drone tech, 3D printing is however huge as it vastly opens up design patterns.
Don't forget you will see tech at businesses and work places before you see it for every day phone usage. Think Little Caesars is fast now just wait until you order the pizza though your smart phone and they immediately grab a hot and ready one and fly it too your house/apartment. Or just wait until you see basic service jobs like mcdonalds just start disappearing as costs of doing it though robots go down. They are already starting to automate more and more experimenting in the states with high minimum wage.
Trike wrote: "3D printers and desktop biolabs terrify me, honestly. It only takes one kid messing about with his Home RNA Kit to unleash some sort of super-virus that turns us all into fluid-spewing goo. Or wors..."You know its going to happen. Humans seem much more interested in doing things and ignore thinking about if those things should be done.
I read an old Sci-Fi romance that posited the desire to create designer babies was going to create a disease that would screw with our reproductive system to the point that men would outnumber women more than 100 to 1. Leading to war, of course.
Trike wrote: "I just turned 50. By the time I'm 65 I fully expect to be able to get into my electric auto here in New Hampshire and say, "Visit my cousins in Ohio," and it will drive me there while I read and nap, stopping only when I want it to, not because it needs to be plugged in. If I spring for an electric auto RV, I won't even have to stop if even I ride all the way across the country."
(Sigh) Trike, I admire your fearless prediction, but I am reminded of a similar prediction I made in 1969, after Armstrong put the first footprints on the Moon. I said "Hey... by the time I retire, we'll have cities on the Moon, maybe even a retirement community where I can go to live. We'll probably be able to take vacation trips to Mars..."
Well... so much for dreams, but that was the way it looked 45 years ago. As has been said (or implied) several times in this thread, technology sometimes goes in directions we didn't expect it to go (and doesn't always go where we want it to).
The difference between putting colonies on the moon and switching from cars to autos is that we have numerous incentives for the latter.Four states have already approved autos for use on their roads and the technology already exists. While I was watching Better Call Saul last night, there were numerous ads for Mercedes vehicles and they all touted various automated systems like lane-keeping, self-parking and automated braking. Turn on cruise control and you barely have to pay attention to the car any more.
The only thing standing in the way currently is the social acceptance of the technology.
I think the social piece is going to fall into place rapidly, too. Kids under 20 are the least interested in owning cars of any generation in the past hundred years, and the younger you go the less interested they are, which has car companies in a bit of a lather, if not outright panic. Increasingly, kids just don't see the value in owning a car.
On the other end of the spectrum, the aggregate age is skewing upward and we're living longer. The Venn diagram of seniors who need a car and seniors who can safely drive one has a small overlap. Florida jumped on the auto bandwagon immediately because that will save them billions of dollars every year in both elderly services and cleaning up accidents.
This is also one of the reasons Honda is pouring so much money into R&D for robot assistants: Japan is graying faster than most countries.
I volunteer for an organization that takes elderly and house-bound folks to their doctor appointments or the grocery store and easily 95% of them could get around just fine if they didn't have to drive. That's a need waiting to be filled and the demand is only going to increase.
The bigger trucking companies already have a number of automated tools in place in their semis to prevent collisions and keep their drivers from speeding. At this point, truck drivers are the least reliable part of the system. Remove them and you can downsize trucks as well as keep your fleet moving 24 hours a day. No mandatory sleep times and smaller trucks means lesser maintenance costs.
All of that adds up to a lot of pressure to put this system in place. There was never a need for putting cities on the moon, which is why we've never even gone back, nevermind built a base there.
My concern about self-driving cars is that someone will hack the system and cause a horrendous nightmare of collisions and destruction. I don't think any car should be allowed as 100% self driving until they fix that flaw. Sadly, our inclination with things like this is to fix it only AFTER a lot of deaths take place.
Personally I want a hoverboard. It's 2015 - Back to the Future said they'd be hoverboards by now....As for Self Driving cars - surely the risk of someone hacking them is less than human error. How many people die on the roads? I am sure some security would be put in place - but nothing is infallible.
MrsJoseph wrote: "My concern about self-driving cars is that someone will hack the system and cause a horrendous nightmare of collisions and destruction. I don't think any car should be allowed as 100% self drivi..."
Yep, and at this point, we will probably need self driving cars before we get hybrid automobiles/airplanes.
A.L. wrote: "As for Self Driving cars - surely the risk of someone hacking them is less than human error. How many people die on the roads? I am sure some security would be put in place - but nothing is infallible. "Human error tends to be limited to 1 human.
But the hacking of cars with digital access is already possible. It really doesn't happen because there's not much you can do with that 1 car.
In order for self-driving cars to really work - they'd have to be networked...and that's where the danger comes in. Imagine what could happen in NYC at rush hour. Or even Washington, DC.
MrsJoseph wrote: "My concern about self-driving cars is that someone will hack the system and cause a horrendous nightmare of collisions and destruction. I don't think any car should be allowed as 100% self drivi..."
I agree with you, but I think the hacking danger is slight enough that the need for autos will override it.
I got a chance to demo the Oculus Rift 2 and 3 at different booths at this year's PAX. It's an impressive piece of technology, and given how many booths were using it to demo their games, and how massive the interest was in those booths, I'd say it's something that is just around the corner from being in mass use. The next step is AR, taking what was learned from Oculus and Google Glass and merging them into a usable product at a lower cost.
3D printing is another exploding market. This is the replicator from Star Trek in its infancy. You can already print food, cars, and houses, if you have the plans and materials. It's not quite there yet, but again, around the corner, everyone will have one of these.
Self-driving is a long way off, IMO. The infrastructure just has too much inertia for this to develop quickly. I'd say by 2040 we might have reliable, widespread use of Self-Drive.
Smart robots are in the same category. Technically feasible, but cost prohibitive and a gray area of legislative nightmare coupled with unforeseen scenarios.
RE: Apple, I don't see them as a company that ever really led the way with new inventions. They are the company that poach inventions from competitors, and make them marketable to the masses with appealing design and fashion strategies.
MrsJoseph wrote: "In order for self-driving cars to really work - they'd have to be networked...and that's where the danger comes in. Imagine what could happen in NYC at rush hour. Or even Washington, DC. "This just isn't true, the only part that would be networked together would be the routing information which is not the active detection on the car itself. Don't forget these cars are going to have to be able to work while there are still non robot cars driving on the road. So while a hacker could cause a massive traffic jam by messing with the traffic net he couldn't cause an accident in theory at least. Don't forget even at higher speeds closer distances these cars will react wayyy faster then the reasonable minimum human reaction speed of 1/5 of a second, let alone sleep deprived or distracted...or heck just not attentively focused.
The biggest problem people have in predicting the future is they look at what technology will be able to do instead of what will be economically feasible. We could all have flying person cars by now infact we could of easily for 10-20 years not no problem. The problem is it uses even more fuel and what would result in a fender bender on the ground if it occurred in midair could be a disastrous wreck that ends with air cars in houses. We could have cities on the moon as well but who is willing to spend the trillions to do that for little return except bragging rights...well it turns out nobody is.
Christopher wrote: "I'm a Mac guy. For me I see Apple as the company that is most likely to bring the future of scifi to the public..."**head scratch**
Apple hasn't really been that kind of company ever. [Well, not since the 80s.] It's a lifestyle company. They excel at delivering slick marketing of reinvented products that have cool-looking and ease-of-use (kind of) interfaces...At premium prices.
They're a luxury goods company.
I'm not discounting their importance to consumer electronics in any way. I think these press release statments from Apple put it quite correctly:
"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.
Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store…
They haven't really been much of a technology inventing company, despite their numerous patents on individual technologies. They've been more about building a brand off ideas others pioneered.
I don't think Apple's really all that interested in pushing tech further. They're much more concerned with maintaining their market share, their image, and their fashionability.
Google, OTOH, doesn't really seem to be quite so brand-forward. I mean, yeah, the Google Glass thing was probably a push toward that, but the blowback shows that's not happening. I see GG as more of a test marketing of ideas. Personally, I find GG pretentious and pointless (and dangerous from a privacy standpoint). Same with Apple's watch.
Wearable tech has no appeal to me. I don't see that it gives any real lift to existing tech.
Google, though it does have a very dark side, is much more involved in experimenting with life-changing technology. Google Maps, their on-going Street View thing, their ownership of Boston Robotics, driverless cars, biometric contact lenses...All that sounds a lot more like developing the SF future than a new iPhone model or a dumb watch.
As an aside...Apple product reveals creep me out. They're delivered with all the reverence and mysticism of High Church. They just need some smells and bells to complete the divine effect.
Micah wrote: "Christopher wrote: "I'm a Mac guy. For me I see Apple as the company that is most likely to bring the future of scifi to the public..."**head scratch**
Apple hasn't really been that kind of comp..."
I'm glad someone said it. :D
I'm willing to bet money that by 2020 all of the high-end car manufacturers will have autos as an available option.They will be limited to speeds under 20 mph by law (nevermind that it's far easier and safer for a car to navigate a highway at 80 mph than a parking lot at 12), and the feature will be touted as "Auto-Valet". Get out of your car at the restaurant and tell it to go park itself. Leave the restaurant and call your car to you.
The first couple-dozen times we'll watch the car park itself, and it will likely draw a crowd. Heck, I'd probably ride along with it during the Auto-Valet just for the novelty of it, and because I won't fully trust it, but after awhile I won't even think about it.
Especially for someplace like a stadium, where parking is a nightmare. You won't care about your parking spot if you're dropped off and picked up at the door.
I'd buy a car with that feature in a heartbeat.
Sure, there will be problems and thefts, but no more than there are now.
Aaron wrote: " So while a hacker could cause a massive traffic jam by messing with the traffic net he couldn't cause an accident in theory at least."Sorry, but that theory isn't worth my life. Or the lives of my loved ones.
Let's not forget that currently GM is still dealing with the fall out from the ignition switch issue - which they KNEW about and still didn't fix. Because it would cost them $1 per car.
Come on. I'm pretty optimistic but trusting car companies that haven't (yet) been sued over multiple deaths that could have been avoided...I'm not that optimistic.
Cars are safer now than they ever were. You should have a look at automotive history and see how far we've come. The Tesla Model S is one of the safest cars on the planet. Major manufacturers aren't doing too bad either. Remember a time before air bags, anti-lock brakes, crumple impact zones, seat belts, or all-wheel drive? How about safety glass?
Even if you never step out your front door your life could be in danger. It's a real world with real issues. Risks are inherent, and doubly so in order to advance progress. We need to develop the tools to deal with a changing world and a changing population with changing available resources, and do it in the most environmentally conscious way. If you don't want to be a part of it, that's fine. We're still boarding and still going to depart.
Kenneth wrote: "Cars are safer now than they ever were. You should have a look at automotive history and see how far we've come. The Tesla Model S is one of the safest cars on the planet. Major manufacturers aren'..."Agreed. And I'd bet even hackable auto-autos would be far safer than drunk, pissed off, texting, latte drinking, yelling-at-the-kids, angst-ridden people drivers are now. Plus, driverless cars don't pull out guns and shoot people when they get cut off in a person-created rush-hour traffic jam.
I predict that when driverless cars become more or less ubiquitous, most accidents will end up being caused by people who have taken their cars off automatic.And, even if there's no accident involved, drivers will be charged with an offense for driving on manual during rush hour when there's no emergency.
Well, I'll not join that revolution until after the death lawsuits have been settled. Until then, I watch and pray.
GM is in danger of being left behind. They are absolutely terrified of a comparably tiny company outputting only a few thousand cars a year. That is a sign of the changing dynamic in the industry. I don't see those lawsuits holding large influence over future trends. Safe, economical, efficient vehicles are the future. Hacking is a legitimate concern, and is why a manual override would likely be a standard feature. Even films from 20 years ago already addressed this when it was still fiction.
Better still, self-driving vehicles will obey traffic laws. They will use their indicators (because some drivers may still be in manual and to alert pedestrians of impending turns). They'll be able to merge without causing jam-ups. Humans are absolutely terrible at merging. We are either too aggressive or too passive and when thrown together, the result is a massive backlog of traffic caused by the passive drivers, and punctuated by the aggressive ones attempting to power through it.
Hmmm. You could in theory hack a car and disable its tracking system and then have it drive itself to your seedy little warehouse on the docks where it's put in a crate and shipped off to another country for a couple thousand...Now I want to buy a car off the internet and have it drive itself to me. :(
Kenneth wrote: "Better still, self-driving vehicles will obey traffic laws. They will use their indicators (because some drivers may still be in manual and to alert pedestrians of impending turns). They'll be able to merge without causing jam-ups. Humans are absolutely terrible at merging. We are either too aggressive or too passive and when thrown together, the result is a massive backlog of traffic caused by the passive drivers, and punctuated by the aggressive ones attempting to power through it. "I believe this...will happen after the first (or even second) round of death lawsuits.
I don't trust that it will start that way. End that way? yes. Start? No.
Kenneth wrote: "Humans are absolutely terrible at merging..."You know the credo: Mergin is WEAKNESS!
MrsJoseph wrote: "Well, I'll not join that revolution until after the death lawsuits have been settled. Until then, I watch and pray."Well...are you the kind of person who upgrades to a new OS version when it first comes out? Or buy a new model of smartphone the first day it ships?
Me either.
But I still eventually upgrade my OS and buy a new model...hang on, I don't have a smartphone!
I suspect that it will eventually become moot, as first cities and then whole states make it illegal to manually operate a vehicle. Honestly, DC, SF, Boston and Chicago need robots to take over.Coincidentally, I saw this on Facebook today:
Trike wrote: "3D printers and desktop biolabs terrify me, honestly. It only takes one kid messing about with his Home RNA Kit to unleash some sort of super-virus that turns us all into fluid-spewing goo. Or wors..."Not to play on your fears but that scenario plays right into the book I'm writing.
Kenneth wrote: "GM is in danger of being left behind. They are absolutely terrified of a comparably tiny company outputting only a few thousand cars a year. That is a sign of the changing dynamic in the industry. ..."As this technology comes closer my guess is that roads and highways with the highest use will see this functionality applied and it's likely that the driver won't have the option to go into manual mode.
For the safety of the driver and everyone else all cars will be driven by AI. But, on side streets and such drivers will be able to zoom around at will.
Micah wrote: "Well...are you the kind of person who upgrades to a new OS version when it first comes out? Or buy a new model of smartphone the first day it ships?"Hahaha! I did get the first iPhone (hubby got it for me) but I don't like upgrades so I don't do it until forced. I also let my apps languish without updates until they are broken.
I tape over the camera on my laptop.
I do not use facebook, twitter or any of those other life trackers.
I don't allow Google on my phone.
My husband says that there's no reason to worry - they're tracking me anyway. This is true. But I try my best to make it as difficult as possible.
Paranoid? Maybe.
MrsJoseph wrote: "My husband says that there's no reason to worry - they're tracking me anyway..."They are. In fact, I can see you. You're eating spaghetti (linguini, whatever)...!
[I have consisdered taping over my lappy's camera. And those XBox things that can tell who's in a room by your voice/face...creepy!]
Trike wrote: "I suspect that it will eventually become moot, as first cities and then whole states make it illegal to manually operate a vehicle..."I can't see it going that far. For emergency use they're always going to have to have a manual option. If there's a computer glitch in your vehicle, the auto will be useless. And if that happens when you're on a highway, you've got to have some way of at least pulling it off the road.
However, I can totally see them restricting manually opperated vehicles to one lane, kind of the reverse of HOV lanes today.
MrsJoseph wrote: "My husband says that there's no reason to worry - they're tracking me anyway. This is true. But I try my best to make it as difficult as possible. ..."It is a false sense of security. But because you can't SEE the information they're gathering on you, it's easy to pretend you have some control over it.
Back in the mid 1990s I worked as an editor at Lexis-Nexis and they have access to all public records. Even 20 years ago all I needed was your name and general location and I could pull up scary amounts of information. I could find your age, the exact floor plan of your house, any legal entanglements you'd had from lawsuits all the way down to parking tickets and even get a decent sense of how much money you made based on your credit score and tax filings.
And that was two decades ago when we still had entire states which were blank because the records simply weren't scanned into a computer yet. Today they can literally track you in real time because of the signal your phone puts out. That's actually how they found drug lord Pablo Escobar back in the 90s, too. Just by having a cell phone you're throwing off all kinds of information, even if you literally never turn it on.
You can also be tracked if your friends are wired into social media and you aren't. Simply by reading Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it's been demonstrated that people who have zero presence online (I think they used the 70-something parents of the study's professors as examples) can be tracked precisely because people around them are doing the work for them. "Having lunch with grandma!" tells them exactly where grandma is.
What I discovered during my time at Lexis was that you can't hide. But what you CAN do is camouflage yourself a little bit. For instance, I had an incredibly difficult time finding my parents. My dad's birth certificate went missing in a fire and he had never applied for a passport. At some point a clerk misspelled his last name, and when they went to have it corrected the new entry was misspelled in a different way. He also owned four properties at once, with slightly different versions of his name attached to each, and they lived in what we called a "dark county," meaning the records weren't digitized yet.
The only way I found him was by knowing details of his life that a stranger couldn't know. But if I were just looking at the records, it would have been next to impossible to link all these various accounts into one person.
So by just having an iPhone, you're actually making it just as easy to find you as you would if you were constantly checking in on various media, because there's only one trail to follow. You can spoof the system, but not by trying to unplug. That's impossible.
Micah wrote: "Trike wrote: "I suspect that it will eventually become moot, as first cities and then whole states make it illegal to manually operate a vehicle..."I can't see it going that far. For emergency use they're always going to have to have a manual option. If there's a computer glitch in your vehicle, the auto will be useless. And if that happens when you're on a highway, you've got to have some way of at least pulling it off the road.
However, I can totally see them restricting manually opperated vehicles to one lane, kind of the reverse of HOV lanes today. "
That will certainly be the interim step between the cars we have now and the autos of the future, but within a generation any manual controls a vehicle has will be vestigial at best. There won't be any obvious controls at all, no steering wheel or pedals. You'll have to pop a hidden panel to pull out a joystick or something.
The other thing that will happen is that for many intersections stop lights and traffic signs will simply disappear. You won't need them. Autos will simply zipper through intersections without even slowing down. Which for people like us will be terrifying but to those raised in that scenario it will simply be the way things are.
And the immediate argument is, "What about pedestrians?" Well, there will be designated walkways for people, and by the time we get to autos being the only version of transportation on the road, people will simply step off the curb and traffic will part around them. In heavily-trafficked areas there will still be crosswalks, but I'm sure that soon enough we will redesign our cities so that peds and autos rarely interact the way they do today.
I live in New Hampshire now and pedestrians are king. I literally no longer think about oncoming cars in parking lots simply because here everyone gives way to the person walking. Whenever I go back to Ohio, I am constantly endangered because the opposite is true there. It can be 3 degrees with a howling snowstorm and most people in cars will assume the right of way, even though the polite thing is to let the person exposed to the elements and carrying bags get into shelter as quickly as possible.
It took me less than a year here to completely switch my thinking. I believe that when autos dominate the road, we will all similarly shift our thinking to the new paradigm and wonder how we ever lived the way we do now.
I'm also a New Hampshire resident. I like to think we're better than Massachusetts drivers.You're spot on about digital privacy. It doesn't really exist. All you can do is become a hermit if you really want to be off the grid. None of the obvious tricks like turning phones off or not engaging in social media have any real effect. For my own part, I use an air gap and passwords/encryption to secure anything I don't want online. It never touches the internet, and can't be searched without a warrant of my house. Granted the content is just photos and writing and music, but I still insist that what is mine belongs to no one else unless I consent.
Trike wrote: "MrsJoseph wrote: "My husband says that there's no reason to worry - they're tracking me anyway. This is true. But I try my best to make it as difficult as possible. ..."It is a false sense of sec..."
Thanks for making me more paranoid.
I for one cannot wait until I can just set my car to drive me on my commute to work which might be a 50-60 minute commute because I can just hook up my PS5 to my oculus rift and playing games on my way to and from work.Interestingly enough the tech experts are expecting that in 10-20 years the only thing the government and everyone else will not know about your life is what you are doing on the internet. This is because right now the really paranoid combined with criminal market are really pushing for this and have actually been making good headway on making stuff that cannot be tracked.
Aaron wrote: "I for one cannot wait until I can just set my car to drive me on my commute to work which might be a 50-60 minute commute because I can just hook up my PS5 to my oculus rift and playing games on my..."PS5? Oculus Rift? So you'll be an old-school gamer, huh?
Most people will just close their eyes and live stream their 3D games off the ubercloud while seeing it via smartlenses (or ocular implants).
You'll really embarass your kids looking like such a dork, but, hey...10/10 for old-school style!
;D
I was curious/excited about the Apple Watch. Will this bring us closer to the Star Trek & Star Wars futures we hope to see in our lifetimes?
After watching the Apple Watch event I felt let down. Don't get me wrong. The tech is impressive and to fit it in a small watch took some advanced engineering, but when you really look at it, it's an iPhone accessory you wear on your wrist.
I was hoping for innovative scifi. Am I wrong for hoping to see a leap forward?