Disruptive Technologies in human augmentation impacting beyond 2040 I

Roberto Saracco April 23, 2018 Blog 1,092 Views

Looking into the future with this pair of glasses, to be on the market in June 2018, linking bits with atoms through Augmented Reality. We might expect much more seamless coupling of atoms and bits in the 2040 timeframe. Image credit: Everysight -Raptor

As we look into the future we are going to face more and more technological possibility to augment ourselves, disrupting, in several ways, what it feels to be human. The Imperial College Foresight study has identified eight technologies that are being studied and experimented in labs around the world that might become disruptive forces in the 2040 timeframe: Smart Glasses and contact lenses, Low cost space travel, Male pregnancy and artificial womb, Dream reading and recording, Cognitive prosthetics, Data upload to the brain, Transhuman technologies, Planet colonization.

Let’s consider them in what I feel can be the order of feasibility, from the “easiest” to the more complex, keeping in mind that the future comes through unforeseen twists that may change our expectations.

Smart Glasses and contact lenses

Augmented Reality is still in the Hype phase, although Gartner in 2014 placed it in a more advanced position that it is today. The reason is mostly tied to an increasing expectation on what AR should deliver. Graph credit: via@chuck2lee 5 Major changes coming to AR/VR in 2018

Augmented Reality is still in the hype stage not because it didn’t progress, rather because we are placing more expectation on it. The availability of libraries for IOs, Android and MS has increased the number of applications, wetted the appetite and shown that much more remains to be done to reach a completely seamless AR.

Google glass on the one hand failed in providing a seamless way to bridge reality with the cyberspace at the mass market level. Only a minority of geeks have bought them (the price level didn’t help either) and it is difficult to call them “early adopters” since we haven’t seen a mass market uptake. However, they have found a niche in some professional applications showing that AR is valuable. Some companies, like Vuzix, are beating the same track, offering AR kit to smarten existing glasses and are targeting the enterprise market (with prices comparable to the Google glass).

New glasses, like the ones that will hit the market in June 2018 at one third the price of the Google glass, the Raptor from EverySight, may lead to broader adoption.

The problem with smart glasses is that they are glasses! Not every one is wearing glasses, and in the future the number of people wearing glasses will be even lower. Hence pursuing a solution that requires wearing something you are not used to is not good.

A more interesting alternative would be wearing electronic contact lenses bridging the physical space with the cyberspace.

An electronic contact lenses potentially able to provide images, hence AR, was tested on rabbits in 2008. Credit: university of Washington

There have been a number of prototype electronic lenses (no one worn by humans, I remember some trials with bunnies back in 2008) but the evolution has been slow and it has been diverted to sensing tears components, as potential indicators for some pathologies.

The technical problems are still huge, particularly those connecting to the heat dissipation that is harmful to the eye (powering of the electronics can be sustained through a wireless energy transfer). We need technology with two orders of magnitude decrease in power consumption (that equals power dissipation) before we can safely adopt electronic contact lenses. This will require two more decades, hence the forecast offered by the Imperial College foresight study is reasonable.

Direct connection of the cyberspace to our brain is still further down the road.

Low cost space travel

Aggressive and optimistic forecast would place 5,000,000 people in orbit in the fourth decade of this century. Credit: Space future.

Space used to be the turf of Governments, first USSR and US, then several others. It used to be too costly to be tackled by private companies. No longer so.

The evolution of technology has increased performances AND decreased cost making space travel within each of private companies and making sense from a business point of view (which is a pre-requisite for a private company to invest money).

There are already a few private companies active in this area, from Axiom Space and SpaceX to Firefly Aerospace.

However you need to understand that today’s “low cost space travel” means a huge amount of money for very little space travel!

Would you like a ticket for a suborbital flight with Virgin Galactic? Get in line, there are already 700 people who have booked their seat for 250,000$US. First flights are scheduled for 2020.
Care for a trip on the Space Station? Be prepared to pay 35,000,000$US (I guess food and drinks are included…).

Building and launching a rocket is still a very expensive business, although when you compare this cost to some other costs it starts to look more affordable. In this graphic the 14M$ cost of the Indian Space Shuttle, under development, would seem reasonable when compared to the cost of Kim Kardashian’ wedding (30M$) and even cheap if compared to the cost of the Spider Man attraction at Universal Studios (100M$). Credit: IBTimes.com

The fact that these figures are considered “cheap” tells a lot about the cost of space travel. In twenty years time a suborbital flight might become affordable by well-to-do, with pricing in the order of 10,000$. Space X is aiming at a 500,000$ ticket to Mars in the second part of this century, and someone is already developing business plans for space tourism.

Clearly the possibility of first exploring and then inhabiting space is a form of human augmentation that used to be reserved to gods.