It’s weird to remember the world before the internet wrapped its tentacles around it. And in a way, I think possessing that memory can f*ck someone up. Sepia-toned recollections of the “good old days” are insidious in the way that they diminish everything new because nothing can quite match-up to the juiced memory of what was.
Someday, we’ll long for this current version of the internet. “Remember Facebook? What about the simple pleasure of dragging a cursor over to a button that you could click to open up an article? 3D porn gives me a headache, I miss the old school stuff.” The future keeps coming and it keeps turning us into wistful senior citizens well before we expect it to. Faster and faster now, it seems.
In 20 years, we’ll be able to reach through our computers and our handheld devices to feel and to be touched. This is according to a professor at Dresden University of Technology.
In perhaps 20 years, we could have a wireless network that would send and receive vast amounts of data in less than one millisecond. At that speed, we would be able to match the reaction speed the human body has to touching something, meaning we could control objects anywhere in the world, in real time, from a mobile device and get the sensation that we were controlling something right in front of us.
Gerhard Fettweis, a professor at the Dresden University of Technology, believes that 5G, the next generation of wireless technology, could be fast enough to create a network of instant-reaction internet devices, mimicking the experience of real life. A study released in December exploring the future of 5G includes Fettweis’ connectivity concept, which he’s calling the “Tactile Internet.”
Fettweis lists such possible advances as virtual worlds, training rooms, synthesized human contact like a handshake or a hug, remote doctors, and driverless cars. And while some of these things may sound like sci-fi concoctions, a few are already in progress.
Scientists at Bristol University are working with ultrasound technology to deliver a tactile experience that isn’t dissimilar to a holodeck, Google is working on a driverless car, and there was the important breast exam interface. And that’s all great, but don’t tell me that you won’t miss the internet as we have come to know it when you’re zipping along the highway in your future car getting fondled by the internet’s magical hand for $14.95’s worth of Bitcoin while enjoying a skin patch that simulates a glass of 60-year-old scotch. Don’t lie to yourself and to me.
Via Quartz