Sixth Sense
Humans will not truly integrate computer technologies in our lives till they are as readily available as the sense of smell or touch. We cannot put on hold our activities or actions to run to a computer terminal, pause a conversation to type in data-or even merely to sub vocalize to access information. The ideal, is that if someone were to mention a country I know nothing about,I could pull up a map of the nation in question and some basic background data. A similar situation will be if someone mentions a band, I could quickly and readily access the bands biography and perhaps even here a sample of the music-without interrupting the conversation a beat. Saying hold on, or rapidly plugging characters into my cell phone is not good enough.
The question is how to input information covertly without taking too much mental effort. First on the list would be to minimize the flow of data. This could be possible with a system likened to autocorrect with microsoft word. The system would learn your personal nuances, learn to project with some degree of certainty what information you are trying to enter before you have completed the information. Casting your eyes around to surf through a gigantic encyclopedia is not effective, nor do we have the technology anytime soon to merge computers directly with our minds [with any real useful degree]. Virtual gloves may do the trick, or an advanced form of a twiddler, but still that would involve a good deal of mental effort that may distract us from our current activity.
The solution may lay in this fact, that most of the questions and assistence we would need is not to much creating data but responding to stimulus. Why should we have to create a search query if the reason for the search has just come to our attention? Either we saw some piece of information that we want to learn more about, or we heard something we would like to know more about. The input would already be there, all we need to do is ’send’ or ‘key’ the data for a computer enhancement. This could be minimally more time consuming and taxing than memorizing information and storing it within specific mental schemas, processes that go on relatively unconsciousnessly.
One benefit of computers that we could use today to enhance our mental capabilities is that computers can extend our short term memory perfectly, limited only be hard drive space and access times. With a simple camera on our glasses and microphones as earrings, we could record everything we see and hear for as long a period of time as would be usable. If there is any dispute about an incident that occured 20 minutes ago, such as what you ordered in a restaurant, it would be easy to scroll back to that moment in time with perfect clarity. It would also be possible to ‘publish’ that ‘memory’ as you saw and heard it.
Extending on the above mention premise of extending our memory, we could also manipulate that memory. It could be possible with minimal effort to ‘pull’ or ‘tag’ some stream of information flowing through the microphone and camera to call up more information. This would prevent the need to create any data, as we are only manipulating data. This should also be within the realm of human capabilities in such a way as not to be overly mentally taxing. During a conversation you could ’select’ the input of a countries name, ’send’ it to a data query engine,’select’ the type of information to recieve, similar to scrolling through windows menus. The data could be displayed most likely visually on glasses or physically on a small device similar to a braille reader. We could use the movement of our pupils to control the flow of information, or we should be able to use our own minds directly.
There is technology for people suffering from a stroke and troubled children to control limited computer games with their minds. It is controlled by their thoughts, and in the case of some children the goal would be to be calm to control the game character. If they get anxious or stressed out the player will go out of control and they will lose the game. It is very limited and is nowhere near recording a single thought. Yet it could be enough to serve the purposes of manipulating data.
Even without mind hook ups or tracking cameras for our pupils, the problem even with a small handheld device for manipulating data is merely how much data is entered in. If we presume that in daily life we’re not going to be creating data so much as processing data, than we can work on minimizing the amount of work needed to manipulate the data. In which case anything from tapping our toes, to fletching a muscle or nodding our head could serve as enough ‘input’ to control the flow of data. We still need voice to text technology to advance enough where data we ‘hear’ can be understood by the computer as easily as the human mind, we would also have to train the video feed to recognize if we are looking at the word ‘dam’ or if we are looking at a fire hydrant. These advances are most likely not limited by current technology, but current understanding. If we knew how to code the perfect image recognizer, or speech to text software, we should be able to do it with commercially available tools. The only real limit is merging the various technologies that exist now together.
