The Unification of Devices - The mobile device of the future

Smart mobile devices have dominated the marketplace. Esteemed marker research firm Nielsen estimates that this year the percentage of the US population with smartphones will reach 50%, and it will only continue to climb in the future.

Mobile devices have reached a form factor that I feel will continue to persist for quite a while. While there exists a large differentiation in size between a mobile computing device like a tablet and a communication device like a smartphone, eventually these two things will converge and bring about a new era of "do-it-all" tools.

Devices on the market now like the LG Optimus 2X, the HTC Thunderbolt, and a variety of others are already running dual-core processors and chipsets with HD graphical capabilities akin to Playstations that only a few years ago were only available in computers. Couple that with true 4G speeds ('true' meaning actual 4G technology like LTE or WiMax) like you find with Verizon, which MSNBC clocked at about 33 Mbps (by comparison what I get out of my wall is 2 Mbps) , and we are only a few generations away from laptop performance in our hands. 

Not only will we see an assimilation in size and form factor, but also capabilities and features that will continue to evolve and shape our relationship to our personal devices; and do away with plastic magnetic cards as we know them.

The personal device of the future will do just about everything. It will house your identification, personal, and medical information, all of your social networks and contacts, your payment methods, your library, etc. The steps are already being taken within the next few generations of mobile devices to integrate your credit card into your phone using a somewhat new technology called NFC, or near-field communication.

NFC uses tiny (within a few mm) magnetic fields generated from a chip in your device. When the field is disrupted by another NFC chip, usually by pressing them together or within very close proximity, data is exchanged and the transaction goes on. Bank of America was the first to begin trial testing of the new services, using Blackberry devices. However, Google who's own Nexus S device already carries the technology has begun partnerships with Citigroup and Mastercard to begin trial roll outs as well.

A recent survey done by Mobio Identity Systems showed widespread interest from the consumer market regarding NFC payments, but the main barrier up to this point has been security-related. How can one protect the information if all it takes to exchange information is a quick bump together?

There are a couple of solutions. The most prominent is implementing a PIN type number required for a transaction to take place. However, there is disagreement regarding it's implementation. Some think that the PIN should be entered on the device after tapping it against the POS (point-of-sale) terminal. The concern here is that the PIN is then vulnerable to viruses, that can track keypad or touchscreen entries, and use them to decipher a PIN. The alternative is similar to what we do now with a PIN, where the card is swiped, information is exchanged and the PIN is then entered on the POS terminal to authorize the transaction. The latter does not make for a seamless user experience as the former, however I think that people would trade more security over a little convenience.

Whatever the future of our mobile devices, it is obvious there are several hurdles to coming up with new standards for everyday behaviors. 

SXSW Interactive 2011 Takeaways

This year's SXSW Interactive conference was an absolute blast. I was privileged enough for this year be my first trip to the tech expo, and it was so much more than I expected. Not only did I get to meet a throng of brilliant and forward-thinking people, but also heard ideas and concerns from people young and old who worked in a variety of markets for companies who recently started in a basement all the way up to Fortune 500.

I wanted to share with you the takeaways from the event, and how they will shape the near future of computing technology as well as our lives. As much as ideas by themselves could solve the problems of today's world, the reality is that much of it is driven by the markets and it is important to understand where you as the consumer, the citizen, and obviously the user fit into the trends.

First, I would like to make one point that I derived from my observations at SXSW: You do not have to buy into any given trend in technology if the cost to you outweighs the value it provides you. I am an avid believer that technology is our friend, but in so doing it must make life easier (isn't that what it's for, or am I wrong?). I noticed so many people constantly tweeting, texting, and checking-in (on Gowalla or Foursquare) on their mobile devices that it caused me to take a step back and wonder what it was all for. Does that constant need to be tweeting your thoughts and feelings truly make a good use of the time, focus, and energy you spent on it? More importantly, is the value you receive from that service worth that time? The power you have as a consumer is the ability to boycott the product, and the businesses know this. They are increasingly trying to provide sufficient value to the consumer to get you to adopt a given technology, and as the consumer/user you must know when to draw the line.

OK. With that said, let's take a look at a few things on the horizon:

• Current Trends in Technology. The future of the technology market is very,very bright. There is a prevailing trend of convergence of a variety of differing technologies as we find more and more ways to use the power of new information and computing to make a positive difference in things from biotechnology all the way up to energy management. This will lead to smaller, faster, and more embedded technology over time that will, in it's end form, become a part of the very thing it enhances (think a cell phone as part of your ear). In the short term however, that means that one device will perform nearly all of the functions that you need on a daily basis and we are very close to this. Also, location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are touching the tip of the iceberg in using location data for social purposes, but soon this data will have massive implications for the way that we drive, work, and make decisions on a daily basis. Continued use of these services will only improve them in the future as more and more data is collected, more recommendations can be made, and the end user experience becomes more seamless. 

• The Workplace. It's no secret the workplace is evolving. As entrepreneurship takes center stage and innovation and creativity become intensely valuable in the new market, the employee must adapt to the changing trends in order to stay relevant. Enterprise applications like those offered by Google are making work collaboration and communication much easier, however face-to-face interactions and competent communication skills are and always will be essential to business. With that said, innovative employers are allowing more and more of their workers to "work comfortably," meaning that they not only choose where they work (whether it be their home or an office located closer to their home), but what tools and devices they use as well (BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device). All of this is allowed through the use of cloud computing, which stores all of the information in one place that can be accessed from any device, anywhere.  

• Education. With tuition rates at colleges and universities on the rise, drop-out rates on the rise, and the information revolution brought about by this age of computing, some are beginning to think very differently about how we should prepare our children, and adults as well, for the future to come. Dr. Dennis Littky, founder of Big Picture Learning and College Unbound, believes that a mentor-like program, somewhat akin to an apprenticeship, would be helpful in preparing relatively underprivileged kids for an entrepreneurial role in the future. His program starts kids on a path for their passion at a young age (9th grade, with the aid of parents, willing or unwilling) so that they can work with something that they love. There are a few downsides to this approach, as Jon Kolko, Founder of the Austin Center for Design, pointed out in their panel presentation at SXSW on March15th. The most prominent of which is that there is still value to the traditional form of education in that it provides students with not only depth of knowledge but breadth as well. Perhaps inducing them to learn things that they would not on their own that will be crucial to their development as an employee, business owner, and a citizen. Thinking on the subject myself, I realized that this structure is already somewhat in place now: We learn a large breadth of knowledge from a very young age to prepare us to be well-rounded students and citizens. Then as we grow older, we become more specialized through higher education and delve even deeper into a given subject matter. The problem is that some students aren't learning the skills they need to be successful in the workplace at school, but instead through experience in the workplace through internships or employment. This is great for current students in higher education, as often times a degree is required to be considered for those jobs, but this only perpetuates the status quo and does not address the issue of students that do not learn from this traditional model. Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Perhaps we should be asking why the kids are dropping out, not learning, and thus not fitting the bill for the new age. Yes, the current model is old, and perhaps broken. Yes, change is sometimes necessary. But up to this point in time, there has been nothing worthy of uprooting the traditional model on a massive scale based on preoccupation of ground. In an ideal situation, perhaps these two differing approaches could work side-by-side. Whatever the case, what is measured is achieved, the people measuring the value of education are the employers, and that should be taken into great consideration when preparing education for the future of humanity. 

I hope there is some information that you can find relevant and useful in determining your next steps in your life and your career. Like I mentioned in my last post, changes are inevitable and we must learn to adapt in order to thrive in this new environment. SXSW Interactive is all about adapting to and creating that future for us, and ensuring that it is a future that we all want to live in. I resonate with that, and I hope you do too. 

The End of Senescence - Could we "defeat" aging in the future?

When we are brought into this world, we discover as we grow older that two things are inevitable: change and death. But what if we took something out of that equation? If we could remove growing older and substitute indefinite youth, what impacts would that have on our equation? While we know that change will never end, progress in the several converging sciences may allow us to live indefinitely in the future, at least Aubrey de Grey thinks so.

De Grey is Chief Science Officer at the SENS, or Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence Foundation, located in California. He has been featured on several shows including 60 Minutes, The Colbert Report, TIME,  and websites like TED and BigThink.com, where they feature a series on the future of aging that I highly recommend checking out.

De Grey posits that there are seven major types of damage caused by aging that eventually lead to death. Among those types include cancer-causing mutations, cellular loss, cellular age, and intracellular/extracellular aggregates. He believes that many of the therapies necessary to remedy these items, and thus end death by senescence, have already been discovered and simply need to be employed.  But is he right?

In 2005, MIT's Technology Review put de Grey and the SENS foundation's claims under the microscope to determine it's legitimacy. The result? A competition was created that challenged teams to prove SENS "so wrong it is unworthy of learned debate" for a $20,000 prize. Of the 5 submissions, no team was able to convince the judging staff comprised of experts chosen by Technology Review that SENS was not worthy of at least such debate. However, the overwhelming answer from much of the scientific community, including several biogerontologists, was that the claims of the foundation were simply "overoptimistic" and would require many more years of hard work to produce anything fruitful.

So yes, a blow to de Grey's claims, but not a death blow by any means. An important aspect of de Grey's postulation is that these increases will be largely incremental, steps at a time, extending the age of humans perhaps 10 to 20 years. In that time, another therapy would be developed that could extend the life of those individuals another 10 years, and so on. Just a few months ago Harvard scientists were able to largely reverse signs of aging in mice, a huge discovery  that could be applied to humanity sometime in the future.

But something that I feel many experts fail to take into account is how fast we are progressing in the several fields of technology and how those discoveries can be cross-applied. Ray Kurzweil, whom I mentioned in my post last week, feels there will be a convergence of several technologies (biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc.) that will result in dramatic life extension. In a video interview with expert-driven site BigThink.com, Kurzweil discusses how the convergence of these technologies will allow for microscopic robots to be able to alter our genes, ending aging and disease, and continuously keeping our bodies optimized. A big claim, but nonetheless plausible.

Regardless of how we may extend the length of our lives, there are many social, ethical, and political implications surrounding the issue that may prevent much of the work necessary to make these technologies possible. The same problems that we face in the present will become even more of an issue provided that these technologies were implemented, the most important and relevant being overpopulation. Indefinite life would lose it's value if the world were ravaged by war and famine caused by our dwindling resources.

Fortunately, technological progress stands to create a sustainable future in which all individuals can experience the fruits of the labor of humanity. Drastic life extension has already occurred in our species' past and the average lifespan of the individual is in some cases three fold what it was just a hundred years ago. We are still feeling the effects of this extension economically, socially, and politically but these effects are not anything that we cannot handle. We just have to accept that ideals of the past are not always what is necessary to provide for the future, and as our progress grows faster and faster, so does the inevitably of our reality: change.

The Law of Accelerating Returns - A foundation for our future

We have all seen the world change around us. Just take a closer look. In a little under 20 years, the internet, what could possibly be the greatest creation of all mankind, has found it's way from DARPA, academia, and corporations all the way into our home computers,  laptops, and now to our mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. The information revolution has begun and we can safely say it is here to stay with profound implications for humankind.

We have created a "always-on," global community in which the world's knowledge can be shared in real-time and information retrieval has become as easy as a Google search.

Our generations are witnessing a point in human technological time which has people like Ray Kurzweil and myself very excited. Kurzweil, a famed inventor, author, and futurist, has worked within the modern computing world for almost as long as it's inception. He has received numerous backings from the likes of several esteemed persons, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, and is now experiencing mainstream attention in the form of a TIME magazine cover, a documentary on mainstream film festivals soon to be released, and interviews with several online sources like BigThink.com about his ideas concerning the future of mankind. All of his ideals draw from what Kurzweil has named, The Law of Accelerating Returns.

This law, which Kurzweil outlines in depth in his 2005 book, "The Singularity is Near," is an extension of the more familiar Moore's Law, which states that computing power on a given chip doubles roughly every 18 months. Up to this point in time, Moore's Law has held true since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's explicit statement in 1965. Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns takes it even further, identifying an exponential trend in the growth of technological progress over time. So not only is technological progress increasing, but the rate at which the progress occurs is also increasing. When a threshold is reached, a "paradigm shift" occurs in which a new technology is created to surpass that threshold and the law continues.

Now, back to the status quo. We are experiencing the rapid onset of technological progress like never seen before in human history, and that progress will continue to increase well into our lifetime at a faster and faster rate. This will bring an unprecedented amount of technological change that will eventually fundamentally transform everything about or lives, from how we live to how long we will live. Kurzweil posits that this progress will culminate in what is called a singularity, a point in time which changes our reality so much that it becomes infinitely more difficult to predict. For us, that may be the development of artificial intelligence far beyond our own that continues to improve upon its nature with its exponentially increasing efficiency and intelligence. Or perhaps it is the augmentation of our own intelligence utilizing nanotechnology or genetic manipulation, that creates a vastly superior problem-solving ability for the human race. Whatever the case may be, it is coming.

While the date is placed anywhere from 50 to 100 years from now depending on the source, the singularity will represent a momentous jump in our evolution. For some, it is the "passing of the torch" so to speak from the past into the far, far future.  A preparation for humankind for all of the challenges that the universe places against our survival and a ticket for our civilization to proliferate among the stars. For others, it is something to be avoided. A future that will bring dystopia and destruction to the human race.

I take the more optimistic view personally. I believe that we can utilize our technology for the greater human race. We can solve so many problems previously thought to be outside of the realm of our understanding, and create a sustainable future in which all humankind contributes parts to the greater collective whole. However, we must get there first.

We need to make a push for a new age of scientific learning to solve those problems. The next 20 years may be the most crucial in determining our distant future as we face some of the greatest challenges against us. Overpopulation, radicalism, and war will ravage this planet only if we allow it. Instead, let's take a more educated, reasonable path and use the amazing things we have created to sustain life on this planet. After all, as far as we know, we are the only manifestation of life in our cosmic neighborhood which makes our existence even more precious.

Welcome!

Hello all,

Welcome to my new blog, Renewed Enlightenment. Within the coming weeks, I will bring discussions about a variety of topics in the sciences that are having an impact on the future of our lives as we speak. From breakthroughs in green technology to discoveries of new planets, I will bring you a brief, yet detailed synopses of some of the incredible things that us human observers have done and bring some fresh ideas about their relevance to the future as well.

I am committed to bringing informed, credible, and educated content from a variety of sources for which I will provide links in-text, and also make recommendations for reading materials and mind-blowing videos that you can find online.

Just by reading this blog, you are already participating in this new future, so let's make it our own!

Best,

Justin