Augmented Humans as Symbiotic Autonomous Systems – Part 1

Roberto Saracco July 25, 2017 Blog 378 Views

Augmented Reality is likely to be the “big thing” in the next decade. Apple has made clear in several occasions they are looking at this as a new market and has released a set of API for developing AR applications. Technology for electronic contact lenses is under development by Google and Samsung, bionic eyes are being experimented along with artificial retina.

Following yesterday post on Smart Cities as a collection of autonomous systems, in symbiosis with citizens, today I propose a scenario where citizens, humans, are augmented and in symbioses with technology extending their capabilities.
I am looking forward to your comments. These will be taken into account in a Whitepaper the Symbiotic Autonomoys Systems Initiative is preparing.

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Yesterday it was overwhelming with so many things to take care of, first the issue with a client upset for the delay in receiving the pallet, then it was the kid who fell at the gym and sprained his ankle and to top it all a leak in the home draining system.
OK, in the end everything was “patched up” but still the stress of the day carried out through the night and Joseph didn’t get the usual restful sleep and now as he woke up he felt a bit dizzy.

The problem with the pallet was a truck whose engine broke down, unexpectedly in spite of the monitoring system that should have warned of the risk and pressed for preventive maintenance. The company taking care of the logistics had to send another truck, unload the pallets from the one that broke down and load them all on the other truck but that took some time and because of the priority of some of the packages they were taken back to the dispatch and rerouted on delivery vans to ensure keeping the schedule. That particular pallet was not tagged as “high priority” so it was simply rescheduled for delivery today, which the client didn’t like a bit, hence his angry call.

It was sort of curious that with the automated logistics, self driving trucks and continuous tracking of goods this mishaps still happened. At least it come out easy for Joseph to know immediately what the problem was as the infuriated customer called him, thanks to an add on memory that contained the updated situation of everything that was going on in the Company and an application that matched the voice of the customer with his identity and the order placed. He had all this information in front of his eyes within a few seconds of receiving the call thanks to augmented eyes (actually just a pair of contact lenses that displayed the relevant information from his phone – he still used an old model, and earbud with a few TB of information and a full slate of connectivity channels, not the new ones that some of his colleagues had implanted in the jaw).

The possibility to have the situation in front of his eyes, literally, at least gave the impression that everything was under control and didn’t make a bad situation worse.

The sprained ankle was really nothing worrisome but it lead to some rescheduling of the activities of his wife and that cascaded on a rescheduling of some of his activities as well. Being away from home was not a big deal since communications with the home ambient was seamless and it didn’t required the provisioning of specific instructions just the update of his kid profile in terms of reduced mobility situation. That was sufficient to have the home management system reconfigure the services to fit the reduced mobility of the kid once he got home. Having the possibility to touch, virtually, the kid’s ankle through haptics was not “curative” of course but it calmed down the kid giving him the perception that his dad was nearby and had the situation under control. The recent possibility of “remote touching” seemed at

A number of technologies are being experimented to provide virtual tactile sensation (haptic technologies). One is REVEL, developed by Disney, based on reverse electrovibration, using weak electrical currents to provide tactile sensation. The advantage of REVEL is that it does not require gloves or mechanical devices, hence the perception is more seamless. We might expect significant progress in this area in the next decade. Credit: Disney

first like a gadget with limited use (they were advertised as “enriching” an ecommerce experience letting you touch the fabric of a jacket before deciding to buy it) but it actually turned out that being able to touch and be touched, virtually, provided a perception of closeness that voice alone could not deliver. Yes, there have been issues with improper use of this remote touching, discussions on the virtual privacy breach, imagine that –virtual privacy-, because you were touching a model of the object in the cyberspace and this touching might not be felt, in some instantiations, by the object (which is an issue if the object was another person’s body). As you can imagine the porn industry was the first to leverage this feature at mass market level and a new industry of “touch” sprang out of this technology.

Next part … tomorrow !