CanonFanBoy said:
rfdesigner said:
scyrene said:
Once again, the law is likely to be the block, in the near term. Soldiers have been subject to all sorts of things that wouldn't be allowed for the general public. And even if there was a demand from younger people (and I'm not convinced many would be willing to have an invasive medical procedure just to have a better porn experience), the law would have to allow it - and laws tend to be conservative, not least because older people vote more. It may happen, but it's decades away from being mainstream, as I keep saying.
Tech people always have an overly optimistic attitude. All sorts of things will be possible, assuming our culture doesn't collapse any time soon. But the more outlandish stuff - nanobots repairing our bodies, augmented senses for those without disabilities, household humanoid robots - is still the stuff of science fiction.
agreed.. the number of issues is enormous.
Personally I don't think we'll ever see embedded smartphones, what we'll see is some kind of embedded standard communication port, like USB.
i.e. buy your smartphone and have an embedded communication link to that device.. all the new whizzy software is on the device, so you change your smartphone every six months but don't need an op every time you upgrade.
The biggest problem is the same as for those women who've had breast implants.. they need renewing every 10 years or so. I certainly don't want anything inserted that would let me in for a series of operations just for a cool feature, but the fact that women go for those implants prove there is a market for implantables.
One wouldn't need a wired connection if the device was implanted. Certainly not a USB type port. WiFi or better yet, something that could change the implanted computer's programming just by being brought near the implanted computer. As micro technology gets smaller and smaller the devices become more and more probable. The computing power and memory of your smartphone today would not have fit inside your house just 35 years ago. Implanted chips are already placed inside dogs and some humans that are read with a reader. Those chips are the size of a grain of rice.
When implantable devices are used it won't be something the size of a smartphone. It won't require surgery.
Even for an ocular implant, it isn't so much that a zoom lens would have to be implanted (though it could be), rather, the hurdle would be to change the way the brain perceives the scene.
Yes, today much of this is science fiction... but tomorrow it is reality. Of course, the original post IS about the future... which is always fiction until it gets here.
From an 1899 issue of Punch Magazine:
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the chips in dogs etc are just RFID - they're passive, and activated by an external signal. While not simple devices, they are a far cry from a smartphone.
Your general point is true - that technology is small, and getting smaller. But it does not follow that surgery would not be required - cf. the current human implantables, like cochlear implants and pacemakers.
As for augmenting human sight, first our eyes work rather differently from a camera in some crucial ways - especially in the sense that much of what we think we see is constructed in the brain - and second, we are nowhere near the level of knowledge or fineness of engineering to interact with neurological signals at the required level of sophistication. Neuroscience is still in its infancy.
It's easy to make wild scifi claims about the future. But the original post was a prediction, from a poll, that smartphones would be replaced by some newer technology within five years. That is still laughable. And not every wishful 'prediction' can or will come true, just because we want it to. Sorry!
