Is that where the "enligtened ones" get their information: talk.politics.misc and sci.skeptic? Please. This is complex matter and nobody knows for sure what's going on. It requires us to gather tons of empirical data from different sources, devise lots of different theories, and then use the empirical data to test the theories. Neither you nor I (and definitely nobody on the Usenet) knows the truth of this matter, only that we should keep an I on it.
Among the most interesting aspects of this is whether governments will try to regulate it. I think that we will in the U.S., at least initially. Creating designer babies will not be foolproof even when the technology matures, meaning that a designer baby may wind up with unforeseen problems. This could be construed as a form of child abuse and there's bound to be more talk about the rights of the unborn. This is the type of issue that may result in international agreements to regulate. Of course, there are bound to be those who resist what they'll view as an infringement on their right to shape their own children.
Even if such matters are regulated, however, this doesn't address the issue of using retroviruses or some other form of genetic manipulation to alter our own DNA. That is, it's one thing for governments to argue that you can't change your children's DNA (exceptions will be made for genetic diseases, I think), but it's quite another for them to say you can't alter your own DNA. This is the type of infringement that many people won't stand for. There will be the old "It's my body and my choice" arguments and it will be difficult to fight against such logic. (Of course, governments already regulate illegal drug usage despite the fact that the same arguments can be made). It will be interesting to see how it works out, but we should remember that ultimately it will become a political issue as well as a moral and technological issue. The politicians will ultimately control or try to control human evolution. How's that for a scary proposition?
I like your comments because they show a lot of the emotion that is going to surround wearables. There will be folk who hate them for the same reason some of us hate Microsoft: they threaten our sense of autonomy, control and personal power. And there will be those who become addicted to them, who feel they offer protection and security in a chaotic and potentially hostile world. There will be all sorts of debates and these will be good for us.
I particularly like your comment that "the whole reason humans didn't end up like giant fungus colonies is because nature figured it was probably better for organisms to exist independantly to be more distributed and therefore more versatile in a non-static environment." Yes, there's much truth to this! But there's also truth to the fact that humans are amoung the most social creatures on the planet. We don't exist independantly; we constantly (hell, chronically) communicate via a plethora of strategies, from facial expressions to pheromones to cell phones, making significant and lasting impacts on one another's nerve centers. Wearables will make these links stronger. And if we ever decide to go the route of implants (and let's face it, somebody will), we're really going to need to discuss the evolutionary repercussions. Will this "Borg mind" reduce versatility, individuality, innovation, or even the chances of species surival? Even more importantly, will it damn our very souls to a Hell of our own creation?
There will be no set time when wearables suddenly appear. There will be an evolution that we'll hardly notice. Even now, wearable displays don't need to make us look like Borg drones. For a substantially less clunky look, try the homepage of The MicroOptical Corporation. Eventually such displays are likely to disappear into contact lenses. As for input devices, basic voice recognition will be nice but not good enough. Other alternatives may be transparent fingernail clip-ons, subvocalization recognition, and other more arcane but equally invisible and quiet input devices. This will happen in less than two decades, though it may not be mainstreamed by then. Eventually, the technology could become so enmeshed in daily life that doing without it may be as frustrating and potentially futile as trying to live without a credit card or an automobile in the States today. For example, you may need such displays just to find the price of a product in a supermarket or to upload road directions from the AAA. You'll probably be able to turn the display off and on with the same ease and frequency that we currently hit our television mute buttons. I imagine there'll be all sort of social implications of wearables. For example, augmented and virtual reality displays may allow telecommuting to become the dominant way of "getting to work." This may make balancing home and work life easier, though it's also bound to blur the lines even more than they're blurred today. Many people may be able to work for nearly any company in the world without ever relocating. This could potentially strengthen communities and extended families while weakening national governments. Such devices may even carry miniature cameras that allow others to see what we're seeing. Adolescents, of course, might love this because it would enhance the feeling that they're in some sort of virtual hangout. On the other hand, you've got to wonder what happens to our notion of privacy if such technology becomes commonplace. Suddenly everybody's posturing like they're on MTV all the time. It's fun and slightly spooky to think about. Truly mobile and invisible computing is going to change the world in ways that PCs never could. Cyberspace and real space will be linked in an embrace that will forever change our conceptions of reality.
In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil offers this assessment of optical computing: "The advantage of an optical computer is that it is massively parallel with potentially trillions of simultaneous calculations. Its disadvantage is that it is not programmable and performs a fixed set of calculations for a given configuration of optical computing elements. But for important classes of problems such as recognizing patterns, it combines massive parallelism (a quality shared by the human brain) with extremely high speed (which the human brain lacks)."
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Is that where the "enligtened ones" get their information: talk.politics.misc and sci.skeptic? Please. This is complex matter and nobody knows for sure what's going on. It requires us to gather tons of empirical data from different sources, devise lots of different theories, and then use the empirical data to test the theories. Neither you nor I (and definitely nobody on the Usenet) knows the truth of this matter, only that we should keep an I on it.
Even if such matters are regulated, however, this doesn't address the issue of using retroviruses or some other form of genetic manipulation to alter our own DNA. That is, it's one thing for governments to argue that you can't change your children's DNA (exceptions will be made for genetic diseases, I think), but it's quite another for them to say you can't alter your own DNA. This is the type of infringement that many people won't stand for. There will be the old "It's my body and my choice" arguments and it will be difficult to fight against such logic. (Of course, governments already regulate illegal drug usage despite the fact that the same arguments can be made). It will be interesting to see how it works out, but we should remember that ultimately it will become a political issue as well as a moral and technological issue. The politicians will ultimately control or try to control human evolution. How's that for a scary proposition?
I particularly like your comment that "the whole reason humans didn't end up like giant fungus colonies is because nature figured it was probably better for organisms to exist independantly to be more distributed and therefore more versatile in a non-static environment." Yes, there's much truth to this! But there's also truth to the fact that humans are amoung the most social creatures on the planet. We don't exist independantly; we constantly (hell, chronically) communicate via a plethora of strategies, from facial expressions to pheromones to cell phones, making significant and lasting impacts on one another's nerve centers. Wearables will make these links stronger. And if we ever decide to go the route of implants (and let's face it, somebody will), we're really going to need to discuss the evolutionary repercussions. Will this "Borg mind" reduce versatility, individuality, innovation, or even the chances of species surival? Even more importantly, will it damn our very souls to a Hell of our own creation?
There will be no set time when wearables suddenly appear. There will be an evolution that we'll hardly notice. Even now, wearable displays don't need to make us look like Borg drones. For a substantially less clunky look, try the homepage of The MicroOptical Corporation. Eventually such displays are likely to disappear into contact lenses. As for input devices, basic voice recognition will be nice but not good enough. Other alternatives may be transparent fingernail clip-ons, subvocalization recognition, and other more arcane but equally invisible and quiet input devices. This will happen in less than two decades, though it may not be mainstreamed by then. Eventually, the technology could become so enmeshed in daily life that doing without it may be as frustrating and potentially futile as trying to live without a credit card or an automobile in the States today. For example, you may need such displays just to find the price of a product in a supermarket or to upload road directions from the AAA. You'll probably be able to turn the display off and on with the same ease and frequency that we currently hit our television mute buttons. I imagine there'll be all sort of social implications of wearables. For example, augmented and virtual reality displays may allow telecommuting to become the dominant way of "getting to work." This may make balancing home and work life easier, though it's also bound to blur the lines even more than they're blurred today. Many people may be able to work for nearly any company in the world without ever relocating. This could potentially strengthen communities and extended families while weakening national governments. Such devices may even carry miniature cameras that allow others to see what we're seeing. Adolescents, of course, might love this because it would enhance the feeling that they're in some sort of virtual hangout. On the other hand, you've got to wonder what happens to our notion of privacy if such technology becomes commonplace. Suddenly everybody's posturing like they're on MTV all the time. It's fun and slightly spooky to think about. Truly mobile and invisible computing is going to change the world in ways that PCs never could. Cyberspace and real space will be linked in an embrace that will forever change our conceptions of reality.
In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil offers this assessment of optical computing: "The advantage of an optical computer is that it is massively parallel with potentially trillions of simultaneous calculations. Its disadvantage is that it is not programmable and performs a fixed set of calculations for a given configuration of optical computing elements. But for important classes of problems such as recognizing patterns, it combines massive parallelism (a quality shared by the human brain) with extremely high speed (which the human brain lacks)."