Whatever you do, don’t read Radical Evolution by Joel Gareau and then go to a trade show. It will ruin it for you. The book is about how technology is changing our lives and how it will radically change humans in the near future. Advances in genetics, robotics, information and nanotechnology, he says, are unprecidented in history. Moore’s law (computers will double in speed and half in price every 12 to 16 months) has produced 24 doublings in computer speed. The closest to that in the history of mankind was when the railroad doubled in size 13 times before leveling off. These advances will soon produce "enhanced" humans with super powers. We will be able to go seven days without eating or sleeping, we will have photographic memories, we will be perfect physical specimens and we will be able to live 150 years. Gareau tells of an experiment at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency involving an owl monkey at Duke University. The monkey was trained to play video games by rewarding it with juice when it did well. Soon, playing the video game was its own reward and the monkey got good at it. Then they drilled a hole the size of a quarter in the monkey’s head and put in a transmitter with several sensors attached to the part of the monkey’s brain that controls his motor skills. They gave him the game controller but it wasn’t hook up to anything. As the monkey played the game, his brain generated the impulses that were picked up by the receiver and sent over the Internet 600 miles to a lab in Boston where it controlled a robotic arm that played the game. The result was a telekinetic monkey who could play video games by thinking about it. This is not sometime in the future, this is today. This just one example of some of the things that we can do with technology and some of the things to come in the near future. There’s more. The army has exoskeleton suits of armor that allow an ordinary man to pick up 150 pounds as if it were 4.4 pounds. They think they can make them leap tall buildings with them in the near future. In the early ’70s we thought we would run out of oil, but that has yet to happen. Why? Because geologists now have the technology to essentially perform an MRI on the earth and see into the ground to find oil. It’s essentially x-ray vision. According to Gareau, within about 5 or 6 years we will have memory pills on the market that will enhance our memories and enhance our creativity. It will give us photographic memories and we will be able to devour books in short order. The upshot to all this is that we’re at a point where radical changes in human beings are just around the corner and we have to be ready to make life changing decisions about it.
So what’s all this have to do with trade shows? I heard Gareau in an interview on NPR talking about all this just before I went to InfoComm. Visions of superhumans were dancing in my head. But when I got to Las Vegas, nary a telekinetic monkey was to be found. No superhumans, no genetics, little robotics, lots of information but no telekinesis, and no nanotechnology. I searched for subtle hints of the future such as video holography, but the closest I found was a 4K resolution Sony projector, which was fantastic, but still no cigar. The only robotics was in the Lighting Pavillion and High End Systems DL2 was the most notable. The closest thing to nanotechnology was the miniature video cameras about the size of a quarter, but a lightyear away from nano-size.
All the dominoes – genetics, robotics, information and nanotechnology – but they haven’t fallen yet.
