At Nokia Research Center in Tampere I gave a talk with the title “Computing Beyond Ubicomp – Mobile Communication changed the world – what else do we need?“. My main argument is that the next big thing is a device that allows us to predict the future – on a system as well as on a personal level. This is obviously very tricking as we have a free will and hence the future is not completely predictable – but extrapolating from the technologies we see now it seems not farfetched to create a device that enables predictions of the future in various contexts.
My argument goes as follows: the following points are technologically feasible in the near future:
- each car, bus, train, truck, …, object is tracked in real-time
- each person is tracked (location, activity, …, food intake, eye-gaze) in real-time
- environmental conditions are continuously sensed – globally and locally sensed
- with have a complete (3D) model of our world (e.g. buildings, street surface, …)
Having this information we can use data mining, learning, statistics, and models (e.g. a physics engine) to predict the future. If you wonder if I forget to thing about privacy – I did not (but it takes longer to explain – in short: the set of people who have a benefit or who do not care is large enough).
Considering this it becomes very clear that in medium term there is a great potential in having control over the access terminal to the virtual world, e.g. a phone… just thing how rich your profile in facebook/xing/linkedin can be if it takes all the information you implicitly generate on the phone into account.
