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1 Future Shock
1 A week earlier, Bill Mitchell, from MIT?s famously forward-thinking Media Lab, told me that in this Cambridge neighborhood, the Technology Square, innovation is sparking and the next chapter in Greater Boston?s evolution is unfolding. That knowledge will reshape everything in our city, from the way it looks at ground level to the skyline we see above, and from the clothes we wear to the cars we drive and the homes in which we live. Car
2 On the third floor of the Media Lab in the Technology Square, the center of what?s supposed to be the New Boston, Ryan Chin, a 30-year-old doctoral student, is leading a team of young astronautical engineers, urban planners, architects, and neuroscientists developing a concept car under the direction of Mitchell and with the help of architect Frank Gehry. Chin says that it?s only a matter of time before the parking dilemma is largely eliminated. In a few years, he says, when the whole area is wireless, cars will communicate with buildings, other cars, and the urban infrastructure — including parking meters. The meters will tell drivers when and where a spot is open. No more blind searching, and potentially less cursing. “It will cut the inefficiency of driving around block after block looking for a space,” he says. Medicine
3 Physicians predict that the medicine chest might remind patients to take a pill. And Bostonians of the future may not have to worry about cavities. Martin Taubman, head of the department of immunology at Boston?s Forsyth Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, has been working on a vaccine that targets bacteria that cause tooth decay. He says he hopes it will be available by 2015. “It will be a vaccine for children 12 to 24 months,” Taubman says. “We think it will have the potential to prevent all cavities.”
4 What doctors will be doing more of is cosmetics. A typical 60-year-old today looks as healthy as a 40-year-old did at the beginning of the last century, says William Adams, a plastic surgeon in the Back Bay. “I think in another 20 years, you?re going to be seeing 80-year-olds who look like they?re 60.” Not because more people will get plastic surgery, he says, but because rejuvenating one?s appearance will become integrated with the prevention and treatment of the aging processes that usually concern primary-care physicians and specialists. Clothing
5 In 2050, Newbury Street will still be the center of the city?s haute couture, but designers won?t be limited to needles and thread. Textile companies are getting closer and closer to seamless fashions that can be heated and formed out of a single piece of cloth. And fashions made to order on the spot with the help of body-scan software will increasingly help designers customize clothes for people, predicts Sondra Grace, head of the fashion department at the Massachusetts College of Art.
6 But the biggest changes in what we wear will come from the technology we expect our clothes to contain. The technology we now carry we will eventually be wearing, says Ned
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Thomas, director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. Clothes designed to protect, connect, and monitor the military will start emerging on the backs of special-forces soldiers in a decade and will filter down to police officers, extreme athletes, business executives, and finally, everybody else.
7 The challenge for the military is obvious: Clothing that can communicate vital signs would be invaluable on the battlefield. The next logical step would be future clothing that could possibly — while monitoring blood-sugar levels, heart rate, and respiration — deliver medicine, act as a tourniquet, or even perform CPR. And clothing that can give soldiers additional strength is being developed by creating “exomuscles,” using fibers that can contract or expand when stimulated by electricity. Eventually, such clothing could be used for more everyday situations, such as protecting the elderly during falls. The Home of the Future
8 Remember Biosphere 2? It was a sealed complex designed to be the first completely self-sufficient environment for people. It made headlines in the early 1990s and then faded out of the news. But the concepts it launched are still mentioned in architecture circles, and they?re increasingly being incorporated into buildings erected in high-density cities. You see them in places like Tokyo and Seoul. Closer to home, there?s Genzyme?s world headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge.
9 Genzyme Center incorporates 18 indoor gardens, and within a few years, the building will be integrated with residences, a hotel, and an arts center. The approach transcends traditional zoning and aspires to build communities where residents live, work, dine, and shop under one roof, says John Hong, a Cambridge architect.
10 Not far from the Genzyme headquarters, Kent Larson, an MIT research scientist, is helping to shape that future by tracking volunteers who live in an experimental condominium in Central Square called PlaceLab. The people who live there for 10 days at a time are monitored by hundreds of sensors — similar to those that keep track of your heart rate on a treadmill. But these sensors are literally built into the woodwork.
11 At PlaceLab, breakfast can be broken down into a series of discrete actions detected by the sensors. At 8 a.m., the refrigerator door opens, the coffee maker is switched on, chairs are moved and occupied. Do it day after day, and the pattern can be put to work. Perhaps a resident needs to take medication after breakfast but forgets — a smart home might remind him that it?s time to take his pills.
12 After sensor information is processed, instruments will begin to share it, says Kenan Sahin, the president of a firm that?s cooperating with MIT on PlaceLab. Ubiquitous person-to-person communication is fairly advanced. Object-to-object communication is the next challenge. Think of a carpet with sensors in it to keep an eye on dust-mite levels — a project Sahin is now monitoring. When the levels exceed a certain point, the sensors will send a signal to a robotic vacuum to get to work…
13 Future life in 2050 seems to be so fantastic that I can hardly wait. I am really looking forward to it.
2 Who Will You Be Working with Tomorrow?
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1 With the increasing growth of artificial intelligence, will technology soon be managing people? As we look to the future, the possibility of computers and machines appearing that are more intelligent than humans becomes more and more certain. But is this really likely? If so, what will it mean for humans? “If there is one thing I would like to have said of myself, it is at least I had a go, at least I tried to change things, at least I did some science.” Claimed Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading.
2 Kevin Warwick has written numerous articles and books such as In the Mind of the Machine and has been described as Britain?s leading prophet of the robot age by none other than Gillian Anderson of the X-Files. A Chip in His Shoulder
3 In 1998 Warwick undertook his most notorious experiment, placing a microchip into his left arm, which communicated via radio waves with antennas in his department. The microchip monitored Warwick?s movement and sent information to the computer that responded in ways such as opening his lab door and switching on lights. Warwick took this a step further in the late summer of 2001 and placed a microchip in his arm to send signals between his nervous system and a computer. He has been successful with the first extrasensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans. He has adversely shocked the scientific community with his original experiment and no doubt his future one will cause quite a stir. Warwick is quoted in The Guardian as saying, “It is easy to not create waves? I am not like that, I?m afraid. I want to try and change things, to have a go at completely altering what it means to be human. And if that upsets you somewhat, that is your problem. I am not going to stay awake at night worrying about it.”
4 Warwick believes that the effect of new technology is unpredictable and has the possibility of producing just the opposite of the desired result. A classic example of this was seen during the industrial revolution when people feared that machinery would replace jobs for humans. Instead more jobs were created due to the demand for and use of machinery. Another example is the fact that computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but in 1999 the world saw a record high in paper production. Through the introduction of the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone, the last two decades have significantly changed the workplace. New technology was supposed to solve longer working hours, work stress and unemployment. The exact opposite has occurred. People are more stressed, work more hours and increasingly neglect their leisure time and personal relationships.
5 Warwick predicts that computers and telephone lines could enable more people to work from home. He envisions that sensations will be created to make us ?feel? and believe that we are actually in an office. Presently, traveling to and from the office and running it is expensive. Working from home means more time with kids and for yourself. Yet in 1999 statistics showed that more business flights were taken than ever before and more office space was built. Perhaps the reality is that people are not entirely solitary creatures and need face-to-face contact. People still crave the social interaction. There may be a rise in people working from home by 2020, but not on the scale technology has made it desirable or possible. Brainwave Learning
6 By 2020, we will no longer be communicating through keyboards or languages. Warwick
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