Will AI, IoT, and VR Converge?

Is your toaster inching closer to your bathtub? Or is that just a mixed reality kicking in. (cross posted)

You probably remember as I do the sacred reveal intoned from the lips of Steve Jobs 10 years ago: “An iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone and an internet communicator.” Of course, the “joke” was on us. It was all one device! Who saw that coming? ??

Apparently, not many of us did. Certainly, not many of us made it a reality like Steve Jobs did.

I’ll roll back the clock another several years to a time when I carried around my Motorolla Brick v2 (I think that was the name?) along with my portable Rio MP3 player which had a massive 32MG drive (I could hold like 20 songs on that thing!). You would have also found on my person around the turn of the century a Kodak DC-20 (proudly displaying a 1 megapixel logo!). My pockets were full and my bag was heavier with the massive compaq laptop stuffed deep inside.

My pockets are still full but mostly with power chords (hurry up Meredith!). My devices however are fewer. Even my trusted Canon DSLR is absent from me most days.

This theme of “convergence” extends beyond just device merging into a host of industries. As the always prescient George Gilder itemizes the history involved:

The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse, the TV converged with the nickelodeon, the word-processing program converged with the typewriter, the CAD program converged with the drafting board, and digital desktop publishing converged with the Linotype machine and the letterpress.

Equally profound are the graveyards of companies, devices and innovations left in the wake of convergence – those that didn’t make the cut. Consider:

• Kodak – This icon seemed the obvious successor to take over the digital picture world. I still feel like my DC-20 took the best pictures of any layman’s digital camera I purchased before the iPhone. But they failed to appreciate the “Radio Shack Factor” – my theory that the easier it was to reproduce your product from parts at Radio Shack the faster your product becomes obsolete. Today, Kodak makes a good deal of its revenue litigating patents.
• Tivo – I was one of the first people to fork over $9 a month for this service but – alluding to Radio Shack again… a hard drive to save videos wasn’t that exclusive and apparently not terribly patentable. Now that I can download Netflix movies to my phone… all of this seems a too-obvious poignant reality.
• GoPro –  The latest sad disaster in the technology arena. These folks never made the cut of merging their product into other devices, OEMs, or even other lines of innovation. (#RadioShackFactor again). Also, in another article I need to write, GoPro has proven that brand is not everything. To be specific, no amount of jumps from outer space onto an xGames arena on fire, high on Red Bull can save you from convergence.

So, I put to you now… what is the next convergence trend? Let’s look at the current candidates (in broad form):

• VR, AR & MR – Oh my! – The burgeoning virtual reality world is replete with failures already but the movement to drive a richer digital real world experience is still in its infancy. Consumer devices are just now in release and this is sure to be a hot space.
• AI – Ever since Jeff Hawkins awesome tome “On Intelligence” this arena has shifted gears from a pseudo-AI programmatic approach to a full-on creeptastic awesomeness that will one day kill us all (and this guy first) (or will he be lauded as their king?)
• IoT – I can usually gauge the impact of technology by how quickly the memes start using it. Yesterday I noticed on Imgur a pun on the command: “Rise up Lights” which apparently sounds like: “razor blades” with an Australian accent.

I think you see where I am going with this. A mixed reality driven by AI and telling our toaster to scoot on over to the tub. Inch by inch… the toaster is moving. Who are the companies that will drive this innovation and who are the ones that will be left in the dust of the next convergence? We shall see. Very soon.