Ideas That In Retrospect You Just Can't Live Without

It's amazing how quickly we start to take things for granted. It's only in a rare bout of retrospection that we realize just how much an idea or technology has changed our lives. There are the big ones that most people know about, the industrial revolution, the automobile, computers, the internet, etc and lots of smaller ones that get less attention but collectively contribute vastly.

So how about looking forward? What are the imminent disruptive technologies that people 20 years from now will look back in awe at how we ever lived without it? It's going to happen. It always happens.

One thing that I think people soon won't believe that it didn't always exist is the ability to record every moment of your life and store it. This ability would vastly change the way we lived yet it is currently completely possible with the technology we have. It won't catch on until the ability is seamless and easy, but that's how it is with everything else. Imagine having the ability to instantly search through any moment of your life and play it back. Think of all the things that you could do. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who has always had this ability and imagine us in 2006 as we live our lives and lose so many of our precious memories forever (until they are simulated after the singularity or worst case at the omega point).

This is definitely something people won't be able to comprehend living without. Any others that you can think of?

One Step Closer to Contact Lens HUDs and Super-Vision

Well, hello, serendipity. My name is Tay. I found these two articles right by each other on KurzweilAI. The first [technology review] is about a group from Northwestern who have developed some cheap, high performance, and transparent transistors using indium oxide at room temperate that could be used for displays. The second [newscientist] is about a UPenn / Stanford tag team that has developed an implantable silicon chip that mimics the neural workings of a real eye.




Edit: Serendipity strikes again. Look closely, they run firefox!

Two New Links

I added two new links. One to the blogger blog of Mitchel Howe, a man who shares many of my interests related to the singularity. He doesn't seem to have updated his page in a while, but there are a lot of archives that are great reads. Also, I added the MIT tech review site. It's updated every day with a few stories on cutting edge technology. Many times you'll find people writing about a tech story that ultimately clicks through to Tech Review.