Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hi brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Today, nearly eight in ten Americans
Speaker 1: own a smartphone, and we've become accustomed to using them
Speaker 1: for everything from listening to podcasts, taking pictures, reading news,
Speaker 1: and posting on social media, to shopping and making financial transactions.
Speaker 1: For many people, smartphones have even taken the place of
Speaker 1: once common everyday implements like tape measures, flashlights, maps, and
Speaker 1: wrist watches. Smartphones have transformed everyday life so much that
Speaker 1: it's easy to forget that they only became popular a
Speaker 1: little bit more than ten years ago. That's when Apple
Speaker 1: released the iPhone, which combined mobile internet access and computing
Speaker 1: power with a multi touch screen interface, making it possible
Speaker 1: to do pretty much everything by tapping and flipping with
Speaker 1: one fingertip or two. A recent survey found that smartphone
Speaker 1: users now spend about five hours a day using their devices,
Speaker 1: which is why it's tough to walk down a crowded
Speaker 1: sidewalk in any major city without bumping into someone fixated
Speaker 1: upon his or her screen. But with technological process moving
Speaker 1: at broadband speed these days, we have to think that
Speaker 1: the smartphone as we know it has A limited life
Speaker 1: expectancy survey of smartphone users across the world by Ericsson,
Speaker 1: the Swedish communications, technology and services company, found that one
Speaker 1: in two people expected that the smartphone would become obsolete
Speaker 1: by which leads to the big question, what's going to
Speaker 1: replace the smartphone? Prognosticators predict that advances in technologies such
Speaker 1: as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and wearable electronics
Speaker 1: will spawn a new generation of devices that could change
Speaker 1: our everyday existence even more than the smartphone did. We
Speaker 1: spoke with Jack Aldrich, a futurist who helps business people
Speaker 1: figure out how to understand and benefit from emerging trends.
Speaker 1: They said, the transition we're about to experience is that
Speaker 1: we're going to go from accessing the internet to living
Speaker 1: in the Internet. We don't have a suitably zeitgeisty name
Speaker 1: for those gadgets, but it's a pretty safe bet that
Speaker 1: they won't be palm sized rectangles with glass screens, or
Speaker 1: with any screen at all, for that matter, and they
Speaker 1: may not even be a single gadget. Brad Barons, the
Speaker 1: chief strategy officer for the Center for the Digital Future
Speaker 1: at the University of Southern California, predicts that the smartphone
Speaker 1: will give way to personal area networks, clusters of tiny
Speaker 1: gadgets concealed in beads, in a necklace, or built into
Speaker 1: eyeglasses or contact lenses. Such devices will use VR and
Speaker 1: a R to project information into our field of vision,
Speaker 1: eliminating the need for a screen, And just as we
Speaker 1: control apps on today's smartphones by moving our fingers, will
Speaker 1: be able to manipulate our next generation personal area networks
Speaker 1: through voice commands or by gesturing in the air, perhaps
Speaker 1: with the help of haptic technology like that buzz when
Speaker 1: you get a text to help sipulate the sensory feedback
Speaker 1: of touching actual objects. Typing may not ever become a
Speaker 1: completely extinct skill, but it may someday become as rare
Speaker 1: as someone who writes an elegant longhand with calligraphy pens.
Speaker 1: But increasingly we won't have to input as much information
Speaker 1: as we once did. That's because next gen intelligent stants,
Speaker 1: imagine a vastly more intuitive version of Siri, Alex or Kirtana,
Speaker 1: will learn to figure out what we want to know
Speaker 1: or do, sometimes before we realize it ourselves. Aldrich predicts
Speaker 1: that in the near future, our personal gadgetry will study
Speaker 1: our eye movements in order to make predictions. Staring at
Speaker 1: something for two seconds, say, might prompt it to give
Speaker 1: us more information about that thing. Barons and visions that
Speaker 1: the intelligent assistance of the future will continually whisper in
Speaker 1: our ears and project messages that only we can see
Speaker 1: that might help us in a lot of ways. If
Speaker 1: we encounter a person and can't recall their name, for example,
Speaker 1: doctor John Smith might flash before our eyes to remind us.
Speaker 1: It's also conceivable that our future devices and intelligent assistance
Speaker 1: may interact with other people's digital assistance, possibly taking the
Speaker 1: place of some of our interaction with actual people. That's
Speaker 1: a prospect that Baron's finds both interesting and disturbing. He
Speaker 1: points to current trends like texting instead of calling, or
Speaker 1: using apps like Tinder to avoid having to walk up
Speaker 1: to that cute person in the bar with no introduction.
Speaker 1: Baron said, some of this is good, but it also
Speaker 1: means that people can increasingly live in their own little
Speaker 1: worlds inside what author Eli Pariser has dubbed filter bubbles,
Speaker 1: where you don't need to recognize that there are other
Speaker 1: points of view about things. But next generation personal communication
Speaker 1: devices may also change us in other ways that we
Speaker 1: haven't yet envisioned. As with the smartphone, we'll have to
Speaker 1: start using them to find out. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other technological topics, visit
Speaker 1: our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.