Beam me up, Scotty

holoportation, Microsoft reasearch

Inventions and discoveries are like the forces of the nature, altering the landscape and ecosystems even without you realizing that the changes are afoot. The only difference is the pace of the changes. Forces of nature make themselves felt in a period on a scale of thousands of years but in the case of inventions the changes are manifested over a far shorter scale.

Inventions and discoveries like fire, wheel and axe transformed the humans from hunters to agrarian communities with better availability of food lower risks and longer lives. Stone Age transformed into Iron Age. Which led to development of language because in a community you have to communicate. Then came the scripts and stone tablets or the so called media. Now not only could you spread the knowledge but also accumulate knowledge that led to the exponential growth in intelligence. Intelligence, which led to the creation of machines. Machines that have transformed the human race beyond all imagination. Steam powered the engines of industrial revolution which sparked the colonial race amongst the European kingdoms. Explorers became the harbinger of new world order and civilizations. Societies that were once flourishing in isolation could not withstand the storms of change brought about by the first wave of globalization.

Steam power created the industrial clusters that led to urbanization and the world was transformed by the hum and din of the mills and the assembly lines. Along came the electricity. It not only transformed the way the power got transmitted from the source to the point of use, but transformed the world into a networked world. Semiconductors and computers are merely the waves created by the storm of electricity.

Science fiction and sci-fi genre offers a glimpse into the future to those willing to use their imagination. Star trek one of the most popular series and my personal favorite appealed to a wide range of audience because at the basic level it offered enough action and drama to engage the minds of the young and old alike. And deep underneath the gripping screenplay was the current of scientific concepts from electronics, astrophysics, and propulsions, medical and even psychological fields.

The flipping communicator of Mr. Spock became the ubiquitous Motorola. Bionic machine control is already under operational testing in many projects and will soon help the disabled to go about their lives simply with the help of brain waves. The point I am making here is this. The ground breaking applications or machines are usually the mere manifestation of concepts that in themselves seem very innocuous. Networking of the electric grids led to the internet of computers which transformed into a cloud and created a global phenomenon called social media. With the transformation of mobile phone and PDAs to mobile devices and the backbone of cloud and social media the world is taking the shape of the pandoran jungle with its neural network as depicted in movie Avatar.     

This brings me to the impact of these technologies as I imagine it going forward. Like the effect email and napster had on creation of social media and its many renditions the efforts and progress in the field of online learning and gaming will be impacting the world in more ways than just changing the education systems. The biggest challenge of online education is to make it interactive and led by AI which is powered by machine learning rather than human teachers. The discoveries and advances in this field will lead to technologies that will make it possible for the students to immerse themselves in the machine constructs a la Matrix and interact with fellow students and teacher without leaving their homes. AR (augmented reality) scopes are already coming free with high end smart phones for that immersive gaming experience. Imagine if you only had to put on a visor and be part of a board meeting in London while sitting in your couch in Austin or New Delhi. In a way the real challenge to the behemoths of transportation is not from the EVs but the storm that is brewing somewhere else.

The observation here are purely based on my imagination rather than any empirical or pure science, I hope you enjoyed reading this piece. Automobiles is a big area of interest for me, and the way it will be reduced to a mere means of getting from point A to B in the near future is a bit of an anticlimax for me. Look at what Google has done to auto drive car, it’s just a blob on wheels. But that will be reality. More on this in the future. Again pure imagination and inspired by the movie “demolition man”.