Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In the Future, How Will We Talk to Our Technology?

Image
One of the best scenes from Larry David’s tour-de-neuroses Curb Your Enthusiasm opens with Larry sitting at a restaurant. As cheesy music plays, the camera pans out, revealing the guy at the table next to him. He’s sitting alone, but jabbering loudly, reminding someone we can’t see that “on no planet is a shoe caddy a good gift.” Then comes the reveal: Cut to the other side of this joker’s head, and there’s his Bluetooth headset. Larry, tired of his crap, starts talking loudly to himself. Eventually he fights with the guy next to him, and then they both go back to complaining to the empty chairs in front of them. Jerks. The episode aired in 2007. Mercifully, the “Bluedouche” problem went away for a while after that—it was replaced by people sitting in silence, staring into their screens, which is at least easier to sit next to. Things are changing again: As we become more reliant on Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and the world of virtual assistants ...
Read more

The Future of Personal Satellite Technology Is Here....

The Future of Personal Satellite Technology Is Here.... Satellites used to be the exclusive playthings of rich governments and wealthy corporations. But increasingly, as space becomes more democratized, these sophisticated technologies are coming within reach of ordinary people. Just like drones before them, miniature satellites are beginning to fundamentally transform our conceptions of who gets to do what up above our heads. As a  recent report  from the  National Academy of Sciences  highlights, these satellites hold tremendous potential for making satellite-based science more accessible than ever before. However, as the cost of getting your own satellite in orbit plummets, the risks of irresponsible use grow. The question here is no longer “Can we?” but “Should we?” What are the potential downsides of having a slice of space densely populated by equipment built by people not traditionally labeled as “professionals”? And what would the responsible and b...
Read more

How Mobile Technologies Are Shaping a New Generation

Image
How Mobile Technologies Are Shaping a New Generation.... The cohort I like to call the “Re-Generation” began to take shape around 2008. Individuals at the formative ages of 11 to 13, those born after about 1995, were part of a substantively different world than the one that had shaped 11 to 13 year old over the preceding fifteen or so years.   Technology, of course, has also been a powerful influence on the Re-Generation, so much so that Bill Gates proposed that we call this next wave Generation I, for Internet. Gates has used the term to refer to children born after 1994, describing them as the first generation to grow up with the Internet. With due respect, most who study the generations would say that Generation Y (those born from 1980 to 1995) was our first generation of Digital Natives — unconsciously competent users of both computers and of the Internet. The World Wide Web, the advancement that more than any other popularized the Internet, started in...
Read more