F U T U R E T E C H N O L O G I E S

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F U T U R E T E C H N O L O G I E S

• Ant Brooks Lawrence Edwards
• Future Foundation

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Why look to the future?

• There are 2 reasons that great enterprises fail
• Inability to escape the past
• Inability to create the future
• Hamal Prahalad, Competing for the Future

"Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities," -
Peter Drucker
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Trends and Cycles

• Trends are long term changes in an environment
• Cycles are (obviously) cyclical changes

• Trends are long term changes in an environment
• Cycles are (obviously) cyclical changes

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Horizons
Long term perspective
Short/Medium term perspective
Scenario planning
strategic research
Market research
Today
5 years
15 years
10 years
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Scenario Planning

• Social Dynamics
• Economic Issues
• Political Issues
• Technological Issues

more
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Trends Our Robotic Future

• Trends
• Industrialisation
• Globalisation
• Consumerism
• Quality of Life

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Consumer Robotics
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Consumer Robotics

• General trends
• Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, estimates
  that 4 million personal robots will be sold in
  2006.
• The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
  predicts that more than 2.1 million robots for
  personal use will be sold from 2003 to 2006.
• Estimated growth from 545,000 sales in 2002 to
  1.5 million in 2006.

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Roomba

• Robotic vacuum cleaner made byIRobot
• What does it do?
• Clean about three average size rooms on a single
  battery charge, which lasts about 120 minutes
• Detect the best cleaning pattern for a given room
• Seek out dirt particles the size of finely ground
  pepper.
• Tiny microphones can detect a high concentration
  of dust particles, for extra cleaning
• Charge itself at a docking station

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Roomba

• Sales figures
• All of 2003 470,000 units.
• First three months of 2004More than 500,000
• Price
• Basic version 150
• Top-of the range 250

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Rest of the Robots

• Robosapien
• Marketing
• Fluid motions and gestures fast dynamic 2-speed
  walking and turning full-function arms with two
  types of grippers.
• 67 pre-programmed functionspick-up, throw,
  kick, dance, kung-fu, belch, rap and more
• Fluent international caveman speech
• Cost Just 99

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Rest of the Robots

• Asimo (Honda)
• Can walk up and down stairs and balance on one
  leg
• Kawada HRP-2
• 5-foot tall, able to get up if knocked down
• Designed to care for the elderly in Japan
• Wakamaru (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries)
• 3-foot tall, wheels, Internet connectivity
• Recognises voice and faces
• 9000 price tag, available only in Japan

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Rest of the Robots

• Aibo (Sony)
• Understands and responds to 100 words and
  phrases
• Built-in wireless LAN connectivity
• Raise from a puppy or an adult
• A multitude of facial expressions
• Cost 1800
• QRIO
• "SONY decided to create a 'partner' that talks to
  you, plays with you, encourages you"
• Child-sized
• Can walk on uneven surfaces, dance, have
  conversations, recognise faces, body language
• Would cost 65,000 if released now

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Trends Terrorism Video-on-demand

• Cocooning
• Terrorism

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Intelligent Living Spaces
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Homes of the Future

• Consider the last few decades
• Microwaves
• Automatic lights
• Larry Ellison's front door

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Homes of the Future

• Living room
• Furniture that adjusts to your body's shape at
  the mention of your name
• Rooms that change the temperature to suit
  individuals
• Sensors that monitor indoor air pollution and
  health conditions
• Kitchen
• Automated pantries, chefs and waste-management
  systems
• Every family member will be able to "order" a
  different meal at the same time, and a robot will
  clean up after them
• A stove with a tap so pots of water don't have to
  be lugged from sink to stove
• Sinks designed to steam veggies right there

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Homes of the Future

• Bathroom
• Polar ventilating system that instantly clears
  odours
• When a toilet seat is raised, the ventilating
  toilet system begins and clears and purifies the
  air
• Maintenance and monitoring
• Diagnostics that call for necessary repairs
• Systems that allow owners to review and change
  their energy-use patterns for greater efficiency
• Safety sensors will not only detect crime and
  fire, but warn us about possible accidents and
  dangerous weather.

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Smart rooms

• Smart architectural surfaces
• MIT's Consumer Electronics Lab Informationand
  Communications University in Seoul
• What are they?
• Each tile is a computer, a display, a camera, a
  speaker and a microphone
• Communicate wirelessly powered by wall studs
• Essentially a pocket PC -- cheap and light on
  power
• If you have a pocket PC, it becomes part of the
  room!

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Smart rooms

• Capabilities
• Seamless video conferencing
• Ability to pick out one voice from many
• Room knows where you are looking, where you are
  pointing

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Hypersonic Sound

• Developed by American Technology Corporation
• How does it work?
• Breaks sound down intoultrasonic
  frequenciesbeyond human hearing
• When the ultrasonicwaves hit something,they
  interact and createan audible sound

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Hypersonic Sound

• How might it be used?
• Speaking to someone on a construction site
• Marketing/product information in a store
• Museum exhibitions
• Passengers in cars can listen to their own music
• Sending instructions to a player on the field

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Trends Talking to machines telepathy

• Ubiquitous technology
• Symbiotic relationship with technology
• Convergence

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Interface
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Devices

• Convergence of devices
• Phone, PDA, PC, TV
• Light-based keyboard
• The skin network
• The business card handshake
• Touch me remotely, baby!
• "Scientists in Britain and the United States
  shook hands on Tuesday. No big deal, one might
  think, but the men in question were 3,000 miles
  apart, connected only by the Internet. -
  Reuters, October 29, 2002

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Devices

• Headsets An immersive visual experience
• i-glasses SVGA 3D HMD
• US1000 and dropping
• 800 x 600 resolution
• includes speakers
• weighs just 200 grams
• Barriers to reality
• Rendering rate
• Number of pixels
• Suns Project Looking Glass
• It almost feels as if you are standing in the
  center of a sphere. You can then roam around the
  sphere with your mouse, viewing windows and open
  applications as you move around" - Craig
  Nicholas, SUN

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Wearable Computing

• Wearable computing
• Reality laws

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Thought Activated Devices

• When will the worlds TV remote control go on
  sale?
• What about a mind-reading music system?

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Unparalysing the paralysed

• 2000 Dr. Miguel Nicolelis trained a monkey to
  move a robotic arm using thoughts and electrodes
  implanted in her brain.
• 2003 Refined the experiment, training a monkey
  to move the arm without even bothering to move
  her own arm.
• 2003/2004 Experiments on Parkinson's disease
  patients to find the individual neurons that are
  activated when someone consciously thinks about a
  movement and then makes the movement. Studies
  have shown that these brain cells remain active
  even in amputees.

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Unparalysing the paralysed

• April 2004 The FDA approved the first clinical
  trial of such a device in paralysed people.
• BrainGate system
• Internal sensor implant carries signals to
  external processors via wires running through the
  skull
• Sensor itself is smaller than a baby aspirin and
  has 100 electrode sensors -- each thinner than a
  hair -- that detect electrical activity in the
  brain.
• Brain Communicator
• Under development at Neural Signals in Atlanta
• Uses wireless technology to transmit signals to
  external processors rather wires.

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Brain printing

• EEG based testing system
• It can determine whether specific information is
  stored in a persons memory
• Brain Fingerprinting testing measures responses
  to relevant words, pictures or sounds presented
  by a computer
• It has provided highly accurate results in
  research conducted over the past 15 years.

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Brain printing

• For healthcare it will reduce costs of diagnosing
  Alzheimers Disease by 75.
• "...up to 70 of major crimes would someday be
  appropriate for applying Brain Fingerprinting
  technology -- Dr. Drew Richardson, former FBI
  counter-terrorism chief and now Vice President of
  Forensic Science for Brain Fingerprinting
  Laboratories, Inc.
• The results of this patented testing methodology
  have been ruled admissible in an Iowa District
  Court.

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Kevin Wakefield
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Trends The invisible world

• Miniaturisation
• Global Challenges
• New challenges

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Nanotech and Biotech
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What is Nanotech?

• Nano means ten to the minus nine, or one
  billionth
• About 1/80,000 of the diameter of a human hair
• 3 to 6 atoms can fit inside of a nanometer
• Term first coined by Eric Drexler in 1986 in the
  book Engines of Creation

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What is Nanotech?

• Nanoscale technologies are the development and
  use of devices that have a size of only a few
  nanometres
• IBM commercial where their Almaden lab had pushed
  together some thirty odd xenon atoms to spell out
  the letters IBM
• This year, investment in nanotechnology by
  governments world wide exceeds 3.5 billion
• The boot-strap problem

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Applications

• Current
• Sunblock, stain-resistant clothing, and catalysts
• Future
• Environmental remediation
• Cleaning up pollution
• Power/energy
• e.g. a liquid slurry that, when painted onto a
  surface, would collect solar energy.
• Medical
• Disease diagnosis and treatment
• Cancer
• Architectural

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Concerns

• What are the effects of nanostructures on human
  health and the environment?
• How will individual privacy be protected from
  surveillance nanosensors?
• How will inexpensive mass manufacture of
  nanomaterials change the workforce?
• How will nanotechnology-related businesses affect
  local and global economies?

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Concerns

• Grey goo scenario
• Self-replicating nanobots -gt out of control
• Fallen out of favour with scientists Unlikely
  scenario

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When?

• When?
• 5-30 year horizon often predicted
• But we actually have functioning nanotech today...

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Biotechnology

• Convergence
• Synthetic biology is about rewiring networks of
  genes, "genetic circuits," to create entirely new
  biological devices.
• Nanobiotechnology"
• According to the National Science Foundation, the
  annual nanobiotechnology market will jump to 36
  billion by 2006.

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Biotechnology applications

• Microbial "factory"
• Developed at University of California, Berkeley.
• Produces an anti-malarial drug, potentially
  cutting the cost of pills from dollars to dimes
  and saving millions of lives every year.
• Diatoms
• Single-celled algae that boast beautiful glass
  shells
• Researchers are reverse-engineering diatoms in
  the hopes of harnessing their ability to build
  precise nanostructures
• With some non-trivial genetic engineering, the
  algae could be coaxed into cranking out shells
  shaped to order

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Biotechnology applications

• Virus-machines
• MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher altered
  the proteins in bacteriophages so that the
  viruses assembled themselves into the building
  blocks of liquid crystal displays.
• More recently, she produced a virus that coats
  itself with semiconducting material and forms a
  bridge between two electrodes.
• Fun with DNA!
• In May 2004, New York University chemist Nadrian
  Seeman reported that he had built a DNA "robot",
  just 10 nanometers long that shuffled along a
  tiny track.
• The next step is to enable the biped to lug
  around a metal atom.
• Biology may actually be the nanotechnology that
  makes nanotechnology work.

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Trends Fear of death Fear of growing old

• George Gilder
• Two fundamental limits that we are reaching
• The speed of light
• The duration of human life
• Ageing population
• Length of working lives

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Immortality
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Life Extension

• Life span statistics
• 1800 24 years
• 1900 48 years
• 2000 76 years (in the developed world)
• Next generation 120-150 is a reasonable
  expectation
• Anti-aging clinics
• 20,000 a year Hormone therapy, DNA analysis,
  Anti-aging cosmetic surgery

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Life Extension

• Objective
• Not to stretch out the last years of life, but
  instead to extend the middle years of life and
  delay the diseases of aging
• Estimate
• 15-25 of all human labour and resources are
  spent on health and longevity

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Why do we age?

• Telomeres
• A chain of repeating pairs of enzymes at the tips
  of DNA molecules
• Provide a buffer zone used in the DNA replication
  process
• Once the telomere has 'run out', replication
  begins to affect the rest of the DNA
• Telomerase
• An enzyme used to increase the length of
  telomeres during formation of cells
• What happens when telomerase activity is
  artificially increased?
• Effective result Increased cell proliferation
  equivalent to 100 years of human life
• The cancer link Cancerous cells have
  "inappropriate expression of telomerase"

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Uploading

• What do we replace today?
• Organs
• Limbs
• Cochlear implacts experimental retinal implants
• Some brain functions (implanted chips)
• Where is this leading?
• Storage of human brain functions in a
  non-biological form

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Whole Brain Emulation

• How do we capture the data?
• Freezing/vitrification Slice and scan
• Problem Terminal!
• Problem Does this capture enough?
• Micromechanical replacement Bit-by-bit
  replication
• Problem Needs nanotech
• Benefit Not necessarily fatal
• Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
• Problem Tech not yet there
• Problem Uncertain if this will capture enough
• Benefit Not fatal

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Whole Brain Emulation

• Philosophical questions
• Self-awareness and personal identity Where do
  they come from?
• What about the soul?
• Assumption Emergent properties of information
  processing

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Whole Brain Emulation

• Applications
• Human backups
• Large-scale parallel processing
• From ten to a million times mental processing
  speed up
• Increase in perceived life-span
• Alternative bodies
• Merging experiences back into the whole
• What about reproduction/children?
• The digital divide of the future...?

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F U T U R E T E C H N O L O G I E S

• Ant Brooks Lawrence Edwards
• Future Foundation