The FDA has denied many drug approvals or sent them back to the drawing board on how it is delivered if tests showed that the users could not be counted on to reliably administer them. Difficult to use placement of controls in cars have caused major losses to auto companies on multiple occasions. Usability is an important design feature in many areas of design.
Usability of a security API is a feature that can have bugs. I'm guessing that these tools with bugs were not created by stupid people and they all made the same mistake in implementing their use of this security API.
Why would the security API be outright absolved of fault in this case? Is there not a pattern of error that is likely the result of some design pattern in the API since it is recurring?
Perhaps I was unclear in the rest of what I said, but this wouldn't intermix mail.
Those with keys would go direct to specific inboxes / servers associated with the key. Keys would need to be able to have multiple owners with different rights too so that a company could revoke an employees rights to communications on their behalf.
What I'm thinking of is more of a personal access control system that would give users full control (sometimes shared with companies / parents) over where they receive communications and who they receive them from. Those who don't have a key go into a universal inbox for unsolicited communications that would probably be mostly spam. There would also be abilities to revoke compromised keys.
If a company didn't want your corporate business going to a personal phone, as one of the owners of those keys, they could easily force that. You'd have to give one of your keys for friends to an individual you work with to bypass that.
It seems odd that in the days of phone numbers being portable we don't have a portable email identity because there is no addressing system.
It would be nice to have a decentralized distributed addressing system that allows us to separate our identity from these providers. Multiple mailboxes could be handled by some type of key system that is a layer under the address. Those could even direct to different providers. I could give one key to family members, others to each employer, others to places I shop online at, etc. There would also be a default mailbox for people without a key.
It could also be taken to another level and provide access to my phone or any other media. Then I could default all with no key to the voicemail / spam filtering system.
There is very little investigative reporting today. What happens here is that a bunch of amateur short sellers write articles for sites where virtually anybody can post an article like seekingalpha performing napkin-quality "analyses" (trash talk) based largely on conjecture to trash the stock. Some of these analyses become popular and get repeated until they become "common knowledge". Then, so-called "reporters" (where did the real investigative reporters with understandings of statistical analyses go?) who are often also either short sellers or in the pocket of short sellers pick up the "facts" from these articles and echo the same analyses in plainer language. Voila, you have a story - the more shocking the better because our society loves to bash those who are making people look bad by actually accomplishing things.
On the other side of the game, I'm actually happy that these people exist. When a good company gets bashed in the market for bad reasons, it usually bounces back. Investing in these and selling when they return to near normal is a lucrative strategy in this environment. Playing these cycles in Tesla has performed much better than buying Tesla a couple of years ago and holding it to today.
It is really sad that we think of ourselves as the most advanced country in the world and yet almost nothing we do is truly sustainable. We take pride in protecting our children and yet consume resources at an alarming rate.
We should be working toward creating systems and infrastructure that is 100% sustainable even if adopted by all of the world's population. That is simply responsible engineering.
It is only cheaper to just landfill the materials because we aren't considering the costs our children will incur in trying to separate out the materials after decades of degradation because natural deposits in easy to remove concentrations are running out.
We should at least estimate that cost and force companies that don't accomplish (not just provide for) 100% recycling to charge for the future costs of material leakage from the pipeline and bank the money in public funds for our children.
? You don't seem to be the only one with this misconception. I see several posts below that echo you. Note that this supercomputer temporarily replaces a Chinese supercomputer at the top of the list that did not use American processors. So, prior to this one, the world leading supercomputer did not use American processors.
Furthermore, this one is not an Intel or AMD machine. Still American companies, but each node in this one has 2 IBM Power9s and 6 NVIDIA V100 Voltas. In fact, the GPUs are the real compute power in most of the really big supercomputers these days and lots of them run NVIDIA GPUs.
The Power9s appear to be made in Malta, NY, but the NVIDIA V100s, arguably the real compute power, are made by TSMC in Taiwan. This machine might be designed in America, but it appears to be mostly made in Taiwan.
These processors are made to work together. The Power9 has native support for the NVIDIA's NVLink connections. The Power9's 16GB of HBM2 memory maintains cache coherency with the Voltas, essentially acting as an L3 cache for the Voltas.
The core count in this system is mind-blowing. The Power9s are apparently the version with 24 cores each. So 24*2*4600 = 220,800 SMT4 cores. The Voltas are hard to quantify. Each Volta has 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). By that count, there are 84*6*4600 = 2,318,400 SMs. This is where the real supercomputing occurs. But each SM in turn contains 64 FP32 cores, 64 INT32 cores, 32 FP64 cores, 8 Tensor Cores, and 4 texture units. I'm not going to even bother doing the math. Suffice it to say that this machine has already broken the exaflop barrier in problems that didn't require FP64 precision.
The transistor count is also astounding. The Voltas have 21.1 billion transistors each. The Power9s have 8 billion. ((21.1*6)+(8*2)) * 4600 = 655.96 trillion transistors just in terms of processors. We've come a long way since the Intel 4004's 2300 transistors less than 50 years ago.
Is it just a coincidence that data on Sea "Dragon" is being reported as stolen by China? If you were to bait a hook for a Chinese hacker, might you consider adding "Dragon" to the bait?
This is a very difficult time to have lost this much ground on manufacturing. Though straight comparison of feature size doesn't tell the whole story due to Intel's better use of vertical space, TSMC's 7nm node is currently making chips that do beat the still future Intel 10nm node in transistor density comparisons. Furthermore, TSMC is scheduled to iterate to a 7nm+ process to further boost transistor density by the end of the year. So their version 2 process will also be out, in 2 fabs, before Intel plans to hit full-scale production on their first 10nm node.
With Apple's needs driving TSMC's development funding, Intel will have a very hard time catching up. It will likely take at least several years, assuming they put forth the investment necessary.
I would have no problem with that. But not happening. And fighting for it just distracts from solving the real problem. Many want you to fight for that.
My point is that military spending is not a part of the problem. If we ended all military spending, the wealthy would consume the windfall. The argument of spending on military and infrastructure versus welfare and education is just a distraction meant to keep your focus away from the real change in wealth allocation that has occurred over the last 50 years. It is not a change in the government's handling of wealth. It is a change in wealth distribution among the people. The top few percent of the country have had an unbelievable run on the backs of everyone else and they aren't going to voluntarily give up what they somehow think they have "earned".
To be really candid, I've come to believe that our real problem is that without poverty, our royalty doesn't feel so royal. Who would they be benevolent to?
We have more money per person than many countries that have far less poverty, even after subtracting the entire cost of the DoD. We could at least match the poverty levels of the leading developed nations (in this and most measures we aren't one of them) without touching the money spent to fight brushfires if we desired to. If we eliminated the DoD, the gulf between the haves and have nots would almost certainly expand. The DoD pays a lot of relative have nots. Relative poverty would increase, not decrease.
Yes! The release of the petabytes of voice, video, etc. captured by the NSA, CIA, etc. worldwide would be awesome training data! Especially the relatively small portion that has been analyzed, professionally translated, etc. as it would have metadata added.
This article was about allowing the sale of drugs that are in early stage development. They've only passed phase 1 trials which leaves them typically years from release and profit. Phase 1 is a level that says it won't immediately kill most people. The drugs efficacy and proper dosage have not been determined as well as safety across larger numbers of people.
My usage of "all levels" was referring to all levels of the distribution path from manufacturer to clinic - not to all levels of development. I was basically just saying, nobody makes money off of phase 1 drugs now, so let's not change that. If they want to make it available to more people who are dying for testing, ok. Just don't let it become a new means of reducing development costs. If we do, that greatly increases the incentive to bring a drug to phase 1 trial that they don't believe will ever make it past phase 1 (because they don't really think it is going to prove better than drugs already approved, its kill level will be to high, etc). So, let the extra testing they get from using it be the drug company's only benefit so they aren't encouraged to give false hope to dying people for money.
I was talking about a billion plus for a single ride, not to get the masses to orbit. As to how much it would help, it is more than enough to fully pay for the development of SpaceX's Dragon 2. This is why we are entering the age of commercial manned space travel. The costs are now within the range of the resources of some individuals to fully fund not only flights, but the development.
As to your expansion of the subject, I doubt we will ever achieve affordability for the billions of people in our "masses" to go beyond LEO. We might reach 10 million in total over the next 200 years. Costs won't be the limiting factor.
If we get to a few tens of thousands, we will sustainably colonize other worlds. Their growth will then come from within, not from Earth. They will grow separate and resist our continued exploitation of their worlds.
Yes, past immigration waves were larger and sustained longer, even to today. But immigration across space is more easily detected and defended against by those already on site.
Both epigenetic and intentional adaptation to these new worlds will happen faster and be more extensive than adaptation from one Earth region to another. They will diverge in ways that give them supremacy versus newcomers in their new environment in no more than a couple of generations. Then the gates close.
The idea isn't to ban profit from the whole lifecycle, just from the development process to avoid the incentive to talk people out of their millions for drugs destined to never make it to stage 2 because they have major problems. The development costs can be recovered post full approval.
Even if NASA would let them launch a civilian on a rocket that is not yet man-certified, they would hold back and serve the long-term customer first. I doubt they have spare builds of the manned Dragon 2 variation sitting around for a side-project - unless perhaps the would be riders are actually willing to shell out billions instead of millions.
I don't think the price tag was ever mentioned. One multi-billionaire willing to shell out a billion plus can change those economics in a heartbeat. If they are that much of an enthusiast, it is likely that the only thing holding them back from spending their whole wad is the desire to do it more than once or to eventually join an underground Moon or Mars colony.
It strikes me that any system for automating a robot that is relatively small and low power is likely to have great attributes for creating personal augmentation systems. The basic requirements of personal augmentation systems include analyzing the surroundings and increasing the person's situational awareness or responsiveness in some way. The only thing this is missing is the features required to deliver the feedback to the individual. Presumably, they aren't missing the outputs to help control devices augmenting personal actions.
Some augmented applications this could be great in include training in virtually any professional sport but especially outdoor ones, motorcycle helmets (especially in sports and off-road contexts), hunting (many hunters would shell out thousands for a full augmented reality system geared for hunting), snow skiing, guided aircraft repair activities, guided vehicle repairs in general, an EMT aide, controlling artificial limbs and exoskeletons, many military applications ranging from personal battlefield computers to personal warehouse and flight deck computers that could tie in with exoskeletons. All of these applications require realtime processing the live environment and presenting analyses and optimal plans based on that analysis and the goals of the tasks being performed to the user.
If we don't want to be replaced, we should stop trying to slow our replacement and instead speed the development of systems that help to make us less replaceable.
Regardless, it is where we will go eventually. The smartphone is a crude and very poor form of self-augmentation already. Augmenting ourselves will happen. If we can't get over the cultural barriers, other countries will take the lead and, eventually, we won't be able to compete.
I never quite got the backlash myself. Maybe we just need to have some cutesy, demeaning name for those that walk around or sit in restaurants looking at their smartphone displays all of the time. It seems worse to me.
Also, Google's attempt was crude and did not naturally merge the "desktop" into the environment around the wearer. To do that, the tech needs to augment both the full field of view and depth of view (information about an object must be in focus near the object), monitor where the eye is looking, fully process the surrounding environment, and display information where it needs to be instead of at a fixed spot. If you do all of this, then you want have the wearer looking away from the natural point of attention for information. This probably requires something like a super advanced retinal laser display tech.
I think regulation could also help. Personal augmentation recording should have legal access and sharing constraints modelled on the constraints of our own memory. Essentially, I am the only one that can see my memory. Recordings made by personal augmentation devices should start with that as the ground rule. Only I can hear or see them. No warrant can access them, and I can't share them except by describing or drawing them myself. Then, we carefully move out from there. To be of any use, my AI assistant and "desktop" needs to have full access also, but they should be treated as internal to the virtual me by the law. Not even a warrant can access them. At this point, we have an effective system that does not violate privacy.
Sharing could be carefully evolved from this point, likely involving rules like a scene can be shared but the system must blur out every person and property that the system doesn't have explicit owner-given permission to share, even to the court. Essentially, everyone has 5th amendment rights to not share there images even when in another's "memory" except that the other could choose to describe the "memories" verbally or with drawing just as they can today.
Altering the system to break the rules should carry severe penalties. In the world of the future, this might not need to be death or lifetime isolation. It could be as simple as barring the person from using the tech. It would be like being reduced to being an animal - literally.
I second that. In terms of how they are used, they've never been smartphones. Browsing and messaging dominate the time spent on the device. It's a computer with a phone capability.
I vote for ditching the display and the concept of holding the phone. The next big thing should be leaving the phone in your pocket and interacting with it via peripherals only with the primary display using augmented reality glasses.
It is going to be interesting to see how they market the new wafer-thin metalenses when they hit production in a few years. They have no need to be round and open up the ability to tune the angle from which incoming light is focused on each pixel of the sensor.
We could have sensors that are a rectangular strip the width of the camera that use a lens that essentially makes each pixel or small group of pixels a camera looking in different directions or the same from varying points of view. The end result should be a camera that can beat binocular vision in depth sensing while allowing depth of field and focus to be selected after the shot is taken.
But, how do you market a return to a single camera to a society focused on numbers? Perhaps it's like the one lens to rule them all.
The average American drives about 1100 miles per month. So, about 4 full charges of a vehicle with a 70kWH+ battery a month. Because it greatly extends the total mileage an auto battery reaches to top off instead of charging fully, a 1/7th or so top off every night is much better practice. This is around 10kWH per night on average. The average is what matters when looking at the grid impact across entire communities. Most nights, cars are parked for over 12 hours. But, let's call it 10 and assume that everyone parks the same 10 and we've got a 1kW average draw. This load can be handled by a 120V-15A plug.
But, this is also making assumptions about nobody charging at work, while they are in stores, or anywhere else. That is also not true. A healthy city will be encouraging employers to add charging so that some of the load is spread into the day too when solar is at a peak. Charging autos at work during the day is one of the best concepts for fully utilizing solar energy output.
We also have several areas in which home energy usage is expected to go down 10-20 years from now, just in time to help with this. The most important of those are some advances in air conditioning that are expected to take about that long to deploy.
This is not the first time we've encountered the overloaded grid threat. Around 1980, we were saved having to perform massive grid upgrades by the advent of the microwave. We'll make similar advances in the future, especially if pressed into it.
Slashdot Mirror
The FDA has denied many drug approvals or sent them back to the drawing board on how it is delivered if tests showed that the users could not be counted on to reliably administer them. Difficult to use placement of controls in cars have caused major losses to auto companies on multiple occasions. Usability is an important design feature in many areas of design.
Usability of a security API is a feature that can have bugs. I'm guessing that these tools with bugs were not created by stupid people and they all made the same mistake in implementing their use of this security API.
Why would the security API be outright absolved of fault in this case? Is there not a pattern of error that is likely the result of some design pattern in the API since it is recurring?
Perhaps I was unclear in the rest of what I said, but this wouldn't intermix mail.
Those with keys would go direct to specific inboxes / servers associated with the key. Keys would need to be able to have multiple owners with different rights too so that a company could revoke an employees rights to communications on their behalf.
What I'm thinking of is more of a personal access control system that would give users full control (sometimes shared with companies / parents) over where they receive communications and who they receive them from. Those who don't have a key go into a universal inbox for unsolicited communications that would probably be mostly spam. There would also be abilities to revoke compromised keys.
If a company didn't want your corporate business going to a personal phone, as one of the owners of those keys, they could easily force that. You'd have to give one of your keys for friends to an individual you work with to bypass that.
It seems odd that in the days of phone numbers being portable we don't have a portable email identity because there is no addressing system.
It would be nice to have a decentralized distributed addressing system that allows us to separate our identity from these providers. Multiple mailboxes could be handled by some type of key system that is a layer under the address. Those could even direct to different providers. I could give one key to family members, others to each employer, others to places I shop online at, etc. There would also be a default mailbox for people without a key.
It could also be taken to another level and provide access to my phone or any other media. Then I could default all with no key to the voicemail / spam filtering system.
There is very little investigative reporting today. What happens here is that a bunch of amateur short sellers write articles for sites where virtually anybody can post an article like seekingalpha performing napkin-quality "analyses" (trash talk) based largely on conjecture to trash the stock. Some of these analyses become popular and get repeated until they become "common knowledge". Then, so-called "reporters" (where did the real investigative reporters with understandings of statistical analyses go?) who are often also either short sellers or in the pocket of short sellers pick up the "facts" from these articles and echo the same analyses in plainer language. Voila, you have a story - the more shocking the better because our society loves to bash those who are making people look bad by actually accomplishing things.
On the other side of the game, I'm actually happy that these people exist. When a good company gets bashed in the market for bad reasons, it usually bounces back. Investing in these and selling when they return to near normal is a lucrative strategy in this environment. Playing these cycles in Tesla has performed much better than buying Tesla a couple of years ago and holding it to today.
It is really sad that we think of ourselves as the most advanced country in the world and yet almost nothing we do is truly sustainable. We take pride in protecting our children and yet consume resources at an alarming rate.
We should be working toward creating systems and infrastructure that is 100% sustainable even if adopted by all of the world's population. That is simply responsible engineering.
It is only cheaper to just landfill the materials because we aren't considering the costs our children will incur in trying to separate out the materials after decades of degradation because natural deposits in easy to remove concentrations are running out.
We should at least estimate that cost and force companies that don't accomplish (not just provide for) 100% recycling to charge for the future costs of material leakage from the pipeline and bank the money in public funds for our children.
No, the Power9 is fabbed in New York.
? You don't seem to be the only one with this misconception. I see several posts below that echo you. Note that this supercomputer temporarily replaces a Chinese supercomputer at the top of the list that did not use American processors. So, prior to this one, the world leading supercomputer did not use American processors.
Furthermore, this one is not an Intel or AMD machine. Still American companies, but each node in this one has 2 IBM Power9s and 6 NVIDIA V100 Voltas. In fact, the GPUs are the real compute power in most of the really big supercomputers these days and lots of them run NVIDIA GPUs.
The Power9s appear to be made in Malta, NY, but the NVIDIA V100s, arguably the real compute power, are made by TSMC in Taiwan. This machine might be designed in America, but it appears to be mostly made in Taiwan.
These processors are made to work together. The Power9 has native support for the NVIDIA's NVLink connections. The Power9's 16GB of HBM2 memory maintains cache coherency with the Voltas, essentially acting as an L3 cache for the Voltas.
The core count in this system is mind-blowing. The Power9s are apparently the version with 24 cores each. So 24*2*4600 = 220,800 SMT4 cores. The Voltas are hard to quantify. Each Volta has 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). By that count, there are 84*6*4600 = 2,318,400 SMs. This is where the real supercomputing occurs. But each SM in turn contains 64 FP32 cores, 64 INT32 cores, 32 FP64 cores, 8 Tensor Cores, and 4 texture units. I'm not going to even bother doing the math. Suffice it to say that this machine has already broken the exaflop barrier in problems that didn't require FP64 precision.
The transistor count is also astounding. The Voltas have 21.1 billion transistors each. The Power9s have 8 billion. ((21.1*6)+(8*2)) * 4600 = 655.96 trillion transistors just in terms of processors. We've come a long way since the Intel 4004's 2300 transistors less than 50 years ago.
Is it just a coincidence that data on Sea "Dragon" is being reported as stolen by China? If you were to bait a hook for a Chinese hacker, might you consider adding "Dragon" to the bait?
This is a very difficult time to have lost this much ground on manufacturing. Though straight comparison of feature size doesn't tell the whole story due to Intel's better use of vertical space, TSMC's 7nm node is currently making chips that do beat the still future Intel 10nm node in transistor density comparisons. Furthermore, TSMC is scheduled to iterate to a 7nm+ process to further boost transistor density by the end of the year. So their version 2 process will also be out, in 2 fabs, before Intel plans to hit full-scale production on their first 10nm node.
With Apple's needs driving TSMC's development funding, Intel will have a very hard time catching up. It will likely take at least several years, assuming they put forth the investment necessary.
I would have no problem with that. But not happening. And fighting for it just distracts from solving the real problem. Many want you to fight for that.
My point is that military spending is not a part of the problem. If we ended all military spending, the wealthy would consume the windfall. The argument of spending on military and infrastructure versus welfare and education is just a distraction meant to keep your focus away from the real change in wealth allocation that has occurred over the last 50 years. It is not a change in the government's handling of wealth. It is a change in wealth distribution among the people. The top few percent of the country have had an unbelievable run on the backs of everyone else and they aren't going to voluntarily give up what they somehow think they have "earned".
To be really candid, I've come to believe that our real problem is that without poverty, our royalty doesn't feel so royal. Who would they be benevolent to?
We have more money per person than many countries that have far less poverty, even after subtracting the entire cost of the DoD. We could at least match the poverty levels of the leading developed nations (in this and most measures we aren't one of them) without touching the money spent to fight brushfires if we desired to. If we eliminated the DoD, the gulf between the haves and have nots would almost certainly expand. The DoD pays a lot of relative have nots. Relative poverty would increase, not decrease.
Guess "NSA" can't start a subject line. Weird or spooky?
Yes! The release of the petabytes of voice, video, etc. captured by the NSA, CIA, etc. worldwide would be awesome training data! Especially the relatively small portion that has been analyzed, professionally translated, etc. as it would have metadata added.
This article was about allowing the sale of drugs that are in early stage development. They've only passed phase 1 trials which leaves them typically years from release and profit. Phase 1 is a level that says it won't immediately kill most people. The drugs efficacy and proper dosage have not been determined as well as safety across larger numbers of people.
My usage of "all levels" was referring to all levels of the distribution path from manufacturer to clinic - not to all levels of development. I was basically just saying, nobody makes money off of phase 1 drugs now, so let's not change that. If they want to make it available to more people who are dying for testing, ok. Just don't let it become a new means of reducing development costs. If we do, that greatly increases the incentive to bring a drug to phase 1 trial that they don't believe will ever make it past phase 1 (because they don't really think it is going to prove better than drugs already approved, its kill level will be to high, etc). So, let the extra testing they get from using it be the drug company's only benefit so they aren't encouraged to give false hope to dying people for money.
Give money to vendors to advance the technology toward the eventual goal of ubiquitous tracking in public places.
I was talking about a billion plus for a single ride, not to get the masses to orbit. As to how much it would help, it is more than enough to fully pay for the development of SpaceX's Dragon 2. This is why we are entering the age of commercial manned space travel. The costs are now within the range of the resources of some individuals to fully fund not only flights, but the development.
As to your expansion of the subject, I doubt we will ever achieve affordability for the billions of people in our "masses" to go beyond LEO. We might reach 10 million in total over the next 200 years. Costs won't be the limiting factor.
If we get to a few tens of thousands, we will sustainably colonize other worlds. Their growth will then come from within, not from Earth. They will grow separate and resist our continued exploitation of their worlds.
Yes, past immigration waves were larger and sustained longer, even to today. But immigration across space is more easily detected and defended against by those already on site.
Both epigenetic and intentional adaptation to these new worlds will happen faster and be more extensive than adaptation from one Earth region to another. They will diverge in ways that give them supremacy versus newcomers in their new environment in no more than a couple of generations. Then the gates close.
The idea isn't to ban profit from the whole lifecycle, just from the development process to avoid the incentive to talk people out of their millions for drugs destined to never make it to stage 2 because they have major problems. The development costs can be recovered post full approval.
Even if NASA would let them launch a civilian on a rocket that is not yet man-certified, they would hold back and serve the long-term customer first. I doubt they have spare builds of the manned Dragon 2 variation sitting around for a side-project - unless perhaps the would be riders are actually willing to shell out billions instead of millions.
I don't think the price tag was ever mentioned. One multi-billionaire willing to shell out a billion plus can change those economics in a heartbeat. If they are that much of an enthusiast, it is likely that the only thing holding them back from spending their whole wad is the desire to do it more than once or to eventually join an underground Moon or Mars colony.
It strikes me that any system for automating a robot that is relatively small and low power is likely to have great attributes for creating personal augmentation systems. The basic requirements of personal augmentation systems include analyzing the surroundings and increasing the person's situational awareness or responsiveness in some way. The only thing this is missing is the features required to deliver the feedback to the individual. Presumably, they aren't missing the outputs to help control devices augmenting personal actions.
Some augmented applications this could be great in include training in virtually any professional sport but especially outdoor ones, motorcycle helmets (especially in sports and off-road contexts), hunting (many hunters would shell out thousands for a full augmented reality system geared for hunting), snow skiing, guided aircraft repair activities, guided vehicle repairs in general, an EMT aide, controlling artificial limbs and exoskeletons, many military applications ranging from personal battlefield computers to personal warehouse and flight deck computers that could tie in with exoskeletons. All of these applications require realtime processing the live environment and presenting analyses and optimal plans based on that analysis and the goals of the tasks being performed to the user.
If we don't want to be replaced, we should stop trying to slow our replacement and instead speed the development of systems that help to make us less replaceable.
Regardless, it is where we will go eventually. The smartphone is a crude and very poor form of self-augmentation already. Augmenting ourselves will happen. If we can't get over the cultural barriers, other countries will take the lead and, eventually, we won't be able to compete.
I never quite got the backlash myself. Maybe we just need to have some cutesy, demeaning name for those that walk around or sit in restaurants looking at their smartphone displays all of the time. It seems worse to me.
Also, Google's attempt was crude and did not naturally merge the "desktop" into the environment around the wearer. To do that, the tech needs to augment both the full field of view and depth of view (information about an object must be in focus near the object), monitor where the eye is looking, fully process the surrounding environment, and display information where it needs to be instead of at a fixed spot. If you do all of this, then you want have the wearer looking away from the natural point of attention for information. This probably requires something like a super advanced retinal laser display tech.
I think regulation could also help. Personal augmentation recording should have legal access and sharing constraints modelled on the constraints of our own memory. Essentially, I am the only one that can see my memory. Recordings made by personal augmentation devices should start with that as the ground rule. Only I can hear or see them. No warrant can access them, and I can't share them except by describing or drawing them myself. Then, we carefully move out from there. To be of any use, my AI assistant and "desktop" needs to have full access also, but they should be treated as internal to the virtual me by the law. Not even a warrant can access them. At this point, we have an effective system that does not violate privacy.
Sharing could be carefully evolved from this point, likely involving rules like a scene can be shared but the system must blur out every person and property that the system doesn't have explicit owner-given permission to share, even to the court. Essentially, everyone has 5th amendment rights to not share there images even when in another's "memory" except that the other could choose to describe the "memories" verbally or with drawing just as they can today.
Altering the system to break the rules should carry severe penalties. In the world of the future, this might not need to be death or lifetime isolation. It could be as simple as barring the person from using the tech. It would be like being reduced to being an animal - literally.
I second that. In terms of how they are used, they've never been smartphones. Browsing and messaging dominate the time spent on the device. It's a computer with a phone capability.
I vote for ditching the display and the concept of holding the phone. The next big thing should be leaving the phone in your pocket and interacting with it via peripherals only with the primary display using augmented reality glasses.
It is going to be interesting to see how they market the new wafer-thin metalenses when they hit production in a few years. They have no need to be round and open up the ability to tune the angle from which incoming light is focused on each pixel of the sensor.
We could have sensors that are a rectangular strip the width of the camera that use a lens that essentially makes each pixel or small group of pixels a camera looking in different directions or the same from varying points of view. The end result should be a camera that can beat binocular vision in depth sensing while allowing depth of field and focus to be selected after the shot is taken.
But, how do you market a return to a single camera to a society focused on numbers? Perhaps it's like the one lens to rule them all.
The average American drives about 1100 miles per month. So, about 4 full charges of a vehicle with a 70kWH+ battery a month. Because it greatly extends the total mileage an auto battery reaches to top off instead of charging fully, a 1/7th or so top off every night is much better practice. This is around 10kWH per night on average. The average is what matters when looking at the grid impact across entire communities. Most nights, cars are parked for over 12 hours. But, let's call it 10 and assume that everyone parks the same 10 and we've got a 1kW average draw. This load can be handled by a 120V-15A plug.
But, this is also making assumptions about nobody charging at work, while they are in stores, or anywhere else. That is also not true. A healthy city will be encouraging employers to add charging so that some of the load is spread into the day too when solar is at a peak. Charging autos at work during the day is one of the best concepts for fully utilizing solar energy output.
We also have several areas in which home energy usage is expected to go down 10-20 years from now, just in time to help with this. The most important of those are some advances in air conditioning that are expected to take about that long to deploy.
This is not the first time we've encountered the overloaded grid threat. Around 1980, we were saved having to perform massive grid upgrades by the advent of the microwave. We'll make similar advances in the future, especially if pressed into it.