Proximity sensing: the next big thing?

In the last few years, some delightful technologies have become available to consumers, driving a new boom in electronics sales. These technologies include touch-screen, wireless Internet, accelerometers and global positioning systems to mention the key ones. I happen to be writing this blog entry on a device that has all of these and more.

But what is next? Have we reached some sort of technological pinnacle now? I think not.

I’m eagerly awaiting one big technology to arrive soon. Proximity sensing.

I’m slightly myopic, but most people don’t realize this. They never see me with glasses on. The mundane reason is that I have an amazing propensity to lose glasses. Most glasses I have ever had take their leave from me after a few months, with the last set disappearing forever on a plane back from the US. What I would love is a device that monitors their position and alerts me if they are no longer in my immediate viscinity.

I can conceive of other applications immediately. Finding golf-balls when they get lost in the rough. Keeping tags on errant toddlers or pets. Finding the car in the car park. Maybe even finding partners to all the odd socks in the house..

The key to such a technology is a thingy known as a RFID tag. It’s a small transmitter that can be attached to any object, so that its location can be determined by an appropriate detection device.

RFID’s are still somewhat expensive, which explains why we don’t see them in the shops just yet. They are already being used in certain specialist industries and their size and cost is reducing yearly. I can concieve a time, however, when rolls of tiny, machine washable or transparent RFIDs will be bought in shops for just a few pence each, or that they will already be embedded in most items bought in the shops.

The detection devices are also relatively straightforward, using simple triangulation to pinpoint objects. Indeed a small pocket device such as a mobile phone should be more than adequate to find missing things quicky.

Add in some some software to determine specific rules, associate items to the tags and enable specific applications and those missing socks will be a thing of the past.

Approaching the Singularity

Evidence has come to light over the past few decades that the ancestors of modern man spent, not a few years, but hundreds of millennia fashioning very primitive tools out of stone in the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya. Throughout that time almost no change in style took place. Sons and daughers simply learned the craft from their parents without, it seems, adding or enhancing the technology. Technological development had reached a plateau.

Now let’s move the clock forward to 200,000 years ago, to the beginning of anatomically modern humans. The tools had changed and social organisation had advanced to the point that humans were able to spread around the world, dominating and sometimes defeating those species that stood in our way. But nevertheless, the technologies throughout this time remained relatively primitive. For much of the last 200,000 years, people lived in small hunter-gatherer communities, surviving from day to day. No great works. No monuments. Despite our slow spread around the globe, change was severely limited by the scarcity of important resources such as food.

Then, only 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, we discovered agriculture. Towns, cities, kings and queens came into existence. Professions and trades were born. Laws and religions developed. Writing was discovered and men went to war in large numbers. Great monuments grew out of the deserts and the jungles. But nevertheless, there was a lot we did not understand. We didn’t have the tools or technology to allow us to fly, or understand the universe, or even to cure the simplest of diseases. It was as if again we had reached a limit in terms of our understanding of the world.

Then along came Science. In the last 400 years, human beings have begun to systematically understand ourselves and our surroundings, to put aside our magical fantasies and to discover what really works. We learned how to put things together to make better things; how to take the properties of the physical realm to beam pictures and ideas around the world; how to put people into outer space; how to cure and prevent the worst afflictions such as Typhoid and Smallpox and how to lay waste an entire nation at the press of a button.  

Even during this decade this progress has continued unabated. We have put probes on Mars, unravelled the human genome and spotted planets revolving around distant stars. You can store the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a few small boxes beside your desk. You can search for and find the information you need, from anywhere in the world, in mere seconds. Faster and faster and faster and faster. As if this progress were approaching an asymptote, a singularity.

It makes you wonder, where will all this progress lead to?

Will we reach a point where this seemingly exponential rise in technology will continue unabated, or will things level off as we reach the limits of our abilities, as yet undefined? Are we living through a short transition point between an early agricultural and an advanced technological civilisation? Will we reach a new plateau, and what might that plateau look like?

A few scenarios come to light, some bad, some good.

The gloomiest and yet more probable of scenarios suggests that our recent advances will end in tears, with humanity blowing itself apart or enacting such a huge price from the environment that the planet seeks revenge, taking us and a large section of our fellow travelling species into oblivion.

A less gloomy scenario suggests that, while not destroying our species, humanity is reset back to the dark ages, or into hunter gathering mode, perhaps to rise again in a few millennia, only to meet a similar eventual fate in due course. A periodic rise/ collapse cycle fluctuating in tune with future Ice Ages perhaps.

Or perhaps we will find some way to live sustainably, in concert with the planet, while not sacrificing our technological knowledge in the process. Could it be that we will look at technology in the same way as we look at door-knobs, napkins and salt-cellars nowadays: where there is little scope for development apart from the vagaries of modern fashions? In this scenario, generations will pass and fads will change, but the overall technology framework will remain roughly constant, just like those humanoids in the Olduvai Gorge so many years ago. 

Maybe indeed all this talk of technological progress is a mirage. Instead, the big events in human society: war, disease, over-population, ideology and catastrophe, drive technology over the longer term as opposed to the prevailing view that technology is in the driving seat.  Perhaps we are simply too close to events to note how technology will adapt to the human story over a span of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. We think we are driven by technology, but perhaps it is only a blip in a much bigger picture in the development of our species.

In an alternative rendition of our future, we are on a course for unending techological advance. Perhaps our curiousity and propensity to keep innovating will know no bounds? Perhaps we will keep on bending, breaking and redefining the limits of the possible? Maybe, as some suggest, we will pass on our propensity for innovation into robots, nano-machines and newly created biological forms, thus maintaining the acceleration indefinitely? 

Is it not too wild to suggest that the end game in all this is a journey to the stars? It may be that we are on course to developing the capabilities needed to cross the multi-trillion kilometer gulfs between our Sun and its neighbours? So in this case, as we board the ships to the sky, the acceleration might come to a sudden halt, to be replaced thousands of years hence by a new burst of activity, followed by further intense cycles of innovation as future generations disperse, ever so steadily, across the galaxy.

A solar energy breakthrough?

Oh my.

A big breakthrough was announced last month by researchers in MIT that may dramatically increase the importance of solar cells as a major source of energy. Up to now, there has been no easy way to store solar energy. The immediate availability of sunlight pretty much dictates how much power you have at any time. As soon as the sun goes down your immersion heater starts to cool down and your solar powered car grinds to a halt.

Meanwhile, nature has been busy mocking us. All around, efficient natural solar factories are at work converting the sun’s heat into chemical energy and storing this energy away for use at a later time. These conversion factories are known to the rest of us as leaves.

Taking a leaf (ouch) from nature, the MIT researchers have discovered a chemical mechanism (a catalyst) that can be used to extract oxygen from water at room temperature. Another catalyst is then used to extract hydrogen from water. All you need to trigger the reactions is electricity (from a solar cell for example). Both gases can then be safely stored away for later use. To create usable energy later on, you recombine the two gasses in a device known as a fuel cell.

Cheap, reliable, clean solar energy generated from within your home. Your house as a power station and as a refueling station. No need to wire your house to a power station. According to the scientists, we might see changes happening in as little as 10 years time. It will be interesting to see how it works out. 

Then again, this is Ireland. Now, if you could extract energy from rainclouds you might get somewhere..

Multi-touch interface demonstration

Even though the multi-touch interface is now a reality in the market (what with the iPhone etc.), nevertheless I’ve been wanting to post this particular demo to my blog for some time. It took my breath away when I saw it.

It’s the future, and it’s comin’ at ya.

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

A tragedy in the wilderness

This story, concerning the fate of the senior editor of the CNET portal in the US is very tragic and very moving. What that young family went through in that last week in the Oregon forests is unthinkable.

“They stayed in the car all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, amid rain and snow, occasionally starting the car for warmth. On Wednesday, they used magazines and wet driftwood to build a fire. The wood was hard to get because it was frozen, Hastings said, so they tried to thaw it and keep it dry by putting it under the car. On Thursday, the Kims burned the spare tire, and on Friday burned the remainder of their tires for heat and to signal for help”

My thoughts go out to his family.