How Will We Communicate In The Future
How will we communicate in the future? In many movies and science fiction novels the most
various communication technologies are proposed:
let’s think to Star Trek communicator, in some ways very similar to our smartphones:
it even seems to have inspired the famous Motorola StarTac and the iPad: Captain Kirk and the his
companions used a touchscreen laptop called PADD. Or let's think of the communication through
holograms projected through portable systems that we see in the Black Panther or Star Wars movies.
Sometimes the inventions in science fiction anticipate reality, but what is the current
situation? What communication technologies are developing? Let's try to find out in this video.
Let's start with Internet, the public access telecommunications network that connects various
devices or terminals around the world. Its origins date back to the now distant 29th October 1969
when a giant computer located in the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park
(California) receives a text message consisting of only two letters: "Lo". It is the first message
sent online, using the technology known as ARPANET: the ancestor of today's global internet.
But what did that message mean? Nothing. Sent from a room at the University of California at
Los Angeles, 600 kilometers to the south, the system that was to deliver it crashed,
thus limiting a text to the first two letters that should have read "login" instead.
More than fifty years have passed since that day and the Internet has gone from an experimental
project supported by the US army to a strategic infrastructure that supports our entire society.
It is no exaggeration to say that our is the "internet civilization", a tool that has
transformed everything: the way we communicate, work, shop, inform ourselves. Even the way we fall
in love. The digital revolution of the network has embraced every social sphere of the human being,
spreading around the world since 1996 and passing from telephone networks to 56k - which struggled
to open a normal web page - up to 5G in mobility, which will allow a surgeon to operate remotely
by maneuvering via the Internet the robot that will physically perform the operation.
In 25 years, the internet has gone from being a technology that according to some would go out
of fashion in a short time to being the backbone of any social activity. According to Toby Negrin
of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet is only at the beginning of its evolution.
But if the evolution of the network is still in its infancy and its maturity is still to come,
how will the online world look like in the coming decades? All experts agree on one thing:
one of the main drivers of the next evolution of the Internet will be augmented reality. This
technology capable of superimposing the digital world on the physical one certainly represents
the next great technological frontier. Imagine getting the GPS directions directly superimposed
on the asphalt, seeing the most important information relating to the monuments of the
city you are visiting in the form of digital cartoons integrated into the monument itself,
being able to preview how a piece of furniture would look in your home. All this by not framing
what surrounds us with the smartphone, but by viewing it through the augmented reality viewers
that the most important tech giants are working on today: from Apple to Facebook (without forgetting
those who have already implemented these tools on a professional level such as Google or Microsoft).
Do you feel excited about these new technologies? Write it in the comments!
We are just at the beginning: in the next few years these viewers - which today appear
as bulky headsets not at all suitable for everyday use - will become more and more
similar to normal glasses, which we will wear in the morning and on which all the information
we are today will flow get used to having on your smartphone: notifications from social networks,
emails, job updates and so on. All superimposed - or integrated - with the physical world,
thus inserting itself without friction within our daily activities.
Where today, to enter an online world, we have to put ourselves in front of a computer
or take out the smartphone, in the future the internet will be directly in front of our eyes:
our basic condition will be to be connected to the network. All this, according to the most ambitious
projects, will become reality in the next five years and normality in about a decade. But in the
research laboratories of giants like Samsung and Apple, the next step is already being worked on:
smart contact lenses, which will definitively integrate the internet into the human body.
What will the world we live in at that point be like?
First of all, the distinction already overcome today between the online and offline world,
between physical reality and digital reality, will be devoid of any sense: we will not live in two
separate environments, but in a single ecosystem in which the digital world will be merged into
the physical world and where all the daily tasks and duties will be done online. Going "offline"
will mean more than anything else finding a refuge to disconnect for a few minutes.
According to Judith Donath of Harvard, “within a quarter of a century, the way we use the internet
today will be considered archaically clumsy. We will no longer have keyboards, mice, or screens”.
The world that stands out in front of us will be a mix of physical and virtual and sometimes
we will no longer even be able to understand where one ends and the other begins (and we won't
even be interested in understanding it). We will interact digitally with the physical environment,
observe advertising posters tailored to meet our tastes, we will recognize our Facebook
contacts because they will digitally carry a label with their name and friends in common.
Probably in the future we will be able to communicate directly with robots and other
machines through brain-machine interfaces inserted directly into the brain to be able
to collect signals from nerve cells, but there are difficulties related to the relatively short
life of such devices. Part of the problem is mechanical: an implant that moves even
a millimeter can become ineffective; another part of the problem is biological: the implant
must be non-toxic and biocompatible, so as not to provoke an immune reaction. It must also be
small enough to be completely enclosed within the skull and must have low energy consumption.
Based on decades of research in non-human primates, John P. Donoghue, Leigh R. Hochberg
and their colleagues at Brown University have created a system that can decode neural signals
and control robotic devices with thought. A small chip, studded with about 100 needle-like cables,
is inserted into the part of the neocortex that controls movement; the motor signals are
powered by a computer which decodes them and distributes them to external robotic devices.
In a study published by researchers at Brown University in Nature, the results were shown
on two patients paralyzed for some time due to a stroke, a 58-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man;
notably, the woman was able to reach out and sip a drink on her own for the first time in nearly
15 years. The safety and feasibility of this brain-computer interface, called BrainGate, is
now being evaluated, intended to put robotics and innovative technologies under the direct control
of the human mind. Would you like to have a brain- machine interface? Write it in the comments!
With chips implanted in our brains, we will also be able to directly carry out
some activities that today we delegate to our smartphones: for example, turn on the lights
or adjust the temperature of the radiator, or set the washing program of the washing machine.
“Be sure to join the Channel! Leave us a like and click on the bell, you will help us to make
products of ever higher quality! " What will come next? The more remote future of the
internet could be marked by the so-called neural networks that startups like Neuralink, founded by
Elon Musk, are working on. An artificial neural network is a computational model composed of
artificial "neurons", loosely inspired by the simplification of a biological neural network.
These mathematical models are too simple to gain an understanding of biological neural networks,
but are used to attempt to solve artificial intelligence engineering problems such as
those that arise in various technological fields (in electronics, computer science,
simulation, and other disciplines). Such neural network models are made up of a
group of information interconnections made up of artificial neurons. In most cases,
an artificial neural network is an adaptive system that changes its structure based on external or
internal information flowing through the network itself during the learning phase.
In practical terms, neural networks are non-linear structures of statistical data
organized as modeling tools. They can be used to simulate
complex relationships between inputs and outputs that other analytic functions cannot represent.
An artificial neural network receives external signals on a layer of input nodes (processing
units), each of which is connected with numerous internal nodes, organized in several layers. Each
node processes the received signals and transmits the result to subsequent nodes.
Thanks to the great computing power of neural networks, augmented reality will be projected
from our eyes, we will be able to carry out online searches as today we bring back a memory,
we will communicate with distant people in a form of digital telepathy.
As Lee Rainie, director of internet research at the Pew Research Center said,
"from a certain point of view the internet will be preloaded in our consciousness."
Would you use a neural network? For which purpose? Write it in the comments!
Neuralink's goal is to insert the internet into the human brain,
connecting the mind to the network via and the chips physically integrated inside the skull,
which will translate thoughts into online searches. But how does it work?
The idea of a neural interface (Brain Computer Interface, BCI), or the development of tools
capable of creating direct communication between our nervous system and the outside,
bypassing our corporeality, is certainly not new in the field of neuroscience. Its history has its
roots almost a century ago, in 1924, when Hans Berger discovered the existence of electrical
activity in the brain thanks to a simple, inexpensive and minimally invasive instrument:
the electroencephalogram (EEG). It was not many decades before the US launched a study program
on the use of the EEG to understand the communication mechanisms of the brain.
In 1976 this interest was met with the demonstration that it was possible to control a
cursor on a screen using visual evoked potentials, an electrical response of the visual cortex
to the appearance of a visual stimulus. Thanks to its incredible potential,
primarily aimed at improving the autonomy of patients with motor disabilities but extendable
to cognitive enhancement and non-clinical purposes (playful and home automation, for example),
research on neural interfaces has literally exploded, giving results that have largely
satisfied the hopes placed there. The signal obtained is first of all amplified,
cleaned and decoded using algorithms designed to classify the various information collected. Once
decoded, the signal is finally transformed into a command that can be read by the device we want to
control, such as a prosthesis, a robot, a cursor on the screen or a muscle of the BCI wearer.
The quality of the signal obtained with this type of methods must, however,
deal with the use of electrodes with limited versatility and duration.
Constructed with rigid metals or semiconductors and assembled together in a fixed geometry,
these electrodes in fact generate frequent potentially dangerous immune reactions and are
underperforming in the long term. The ideal candidates to overcome the limitations of
rigid electrodes are those in polymer, with greater biocompatibility and performance, but
whose size and flexibility make their insertion practically impossible through current procedures.
All this, however, will have a price to pay: what will become of privacy when our every behavior and
movement is recorded, because it is carried out within the network? Who and how will handle this
highly sensitive information? How can we escape the digital gaze if each of us will circulate
with cameras connected directly to the eyes? And what will be the risks in terms of security,
linked to the possibility of directly hacking the connected elements present in our brain? Will our
brain be able to manage this immense amount of information that all of a sudden will swoop
down on it? Or will he go crazy? And finally, if authoritarian governments are already learning to
perfection to exploit the internet to have ever more rigid control over society, what will happen
when the possibilities in terms of surveillance, control, knowledge and the ability to influence
our behavior increase dramatically exponential? Can these technologies alter decision making,
or affect our emotions? Then there are problems linked to the inequalities that will arise between
those who can afford these technologies and those who will be excluded from them.
The control over the risk-free effectiveness of these new technologies,
therefore safety, should be ensured upstream by institutional controls,
which should also monitor the truthfulness of the messages conveyed by the media to the population.
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