"A Day in the Future": An artificial personal assistant… inside our...

"A day in the future” is a series of posts about fictional and "mundane" conversations people will have in the future. The goal for me here is to present futurists day to day interactions from a human point of view.

But first, I want to share with you some information about today's subject.

As probably we all know, Elon Musk is one of the most futuristic entrepreneurs in the whole planet, having famous companies like Tesla and SpaceX.

There is one company that is heavily backed by Musk and is not as well known as the other 2, it is called Neuralink and they are "developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." | Source

What are Brain-Computer interfaces?

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a collaboration between a brain and a device that enables signals from the brain to direct some external activity, such as control of a cursor or a prosthetic limb | Source

A BCI is a computer-based system that acquires brain signals, analyzes them, and translates them into commands that are relayed to an output device to carry out a desired action. | Source

This means that each day we are getting closer and closer to achieve what we see in Hollywood’s movies. It is possible that there will be a day when the spies hack the devices that are inside our brains to send themselves the sound and the images that we see and hear with our own senses. On the other hand, it would be the best tool ever designed to diagnose mental and vision diseases, showing doctors exactly what our senses perceive.

Some of the goals for Neuralink:

Create new implants that can be surgically inserted into the human brain

Allow humans to mentally interact with the devices around them

Let humans amass data via the chip

Help out the medical field treat more injuries. | Source

This technology has its most obvious use in the medical field, even today there are examples of people being able to rudimentary manipulate a synthetic arm with their brain, similarly, people with disabilities (such as paraplegics) would be able to overcome their difficulties and gain some independence, but this has a lot of military and civil applications. Among them, one of the most interesting would be the power to dictate your thoughts to a computer that would "write" what you think, what I'm sure would increase by a lot the number people would devote themselves to literature, and even more incredible is that this technology could make a "telepathy" system come true, thanks also to wireless technology it would be possible to create a dialogue between two individuals just by thinking about it.

The way for this type of “telepathy” to work would be to “simply” transform our thoughts into words, and send this information using the internet like a regular audio for the other person to hear.

Another possible application of this technology would be the opportunity to visually design images like in Photoshop or Autocad, but in this case just by thinking without even touching a touchpad or a touchscreen. That is, computerized systems connected to our brains that will interpret our visual images that we think and transform them into digital images, which will undoubtedly greatly accelerate not only the development of these type of images, but also the visual communication between us humans. Sometimes an image speaks better than 1000 words, and this technology could eventually help us by providing us with new ways of communicating between each other.

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Can you imagine a device the is able to project information directly in your retina, understand whatever you want to communicate just from your thoughts without you needing to speak, and besides is able to communicate with you directly using your auditory sense?

I present you here, a brief dialogue from the future between a man and his artificial personal assistant when going to a meeting

"A Day in the Future": An artificial personal assistant… inside our head

-Tom (thinking to himself): What a day this! I do not feel at all well and I have a metting with people who do not even tell me why we are going to meet, and to top it off we have to meet in person. What a day I am having ...

-Tom (thinking the words whenever he communicates with HAL): HAL, agenda of the day.

-HAL (at all times creating sounds directly to the brain and images to Tom's retina): Meeting with executives of Capitotal ‪at 8 o'clock‬ in the morning, in their corporate building. Do you want to arrange an Uber to pick us up at 7 in the morning?

-Tom: Yes please

-HAL: Uber scheduled, it will pick us up at our coordinates. Do I order the usual coffee for the trip?

-Tom: Yes, but this time with less sugar please.

Several minutes later…

-HAL: We should hurry a little bit, the Uber will arrive in 2 minutes with 23 seconds.

-Tom: All right HAL, please upload my presentation to your memory to review it on the way in my visual field.

-HAL: Presentation loaded. Starting sequence of arming the apartment’s security system.

-Tom: Thanks for opening the door Hal. Please schedule someone to clean the apartment while we are away.

-HAL: Scheduled. The cleaning unit will arrive in 18 minutes, and the temporary access codes have been sent and verified.

-Tom: Excellent, let's go to the meeting ...

Several minutes later…

-HAL: We are approaching Capitotal. Do you want to record the meeting?

-Tom: Yes please HAL. Video from eyes and surrounding audio. Start recording now.

-HAL: Recording started. I just contacted the Capitotal visitor system, our credentials have been successfully verified and they are waiting for us.

-Tom: Great work HAL, that’s perfect.

-Receptionist: Over here, please, Sir.

-Tom: Thank you.

-Hannah: Good morning Tom, we were waiting for you! and please forgive me for the fact that the meeting needs to be in person, you know how some of our bosses are, a little bit outdated ...

-Tom (communicating with HAL using his thoughts): HAL, who is she? I do not remember her very well?

-HAL (while showings the video on Tom’s retina of the last virtual meeting in Berlin’s offices 2 years ago): Hannah Kross, Marketing Manager. Age 45, extroverted, her social profiles indicate a passion for history, nature and astronomy. This is the sixth company in which she works in the marketing area. Her public photos indicate that she prefers to wear bright colors, in addition to indicating that she has at least 2 children and at least one grandchild, one of her children is a psychologist for AIs, and the other is an engineer working with the Space Elevator. Her parents died before the Singularity. Also, her life ...

-Tom (smiling to himself): Enough HAL, it's not that I want to marry this woman, I just wanted to remember who she is.

-Tom: Hello Hannah! I almost didn’t remember you from that time in Berlin ...

-Hannah: Yes, almost 2 years ago, and you have the same face that you put when you communicate with that intelligent assistant of yours when you do not remember something …

-Tom (blushing): Ha ha! You know how it is these days, and my memory has never served me right, just like my father's …

-Hannah: Do as I did and simply pay for a nano-neuronal treatment and resolve your issue of bad memory once and for all …

-Tom: Maybe one of these days, in the meantime HAL is doing very well ...

-Hannah: you named it HAL? What a geek! although that’s reason for this meeting today, our general manager has seen some your work online and he is very impressed with you, he thinks that you could be a good member for this company to improve our line of products for retro-geeks. That's why Daniel Faye himself wants to offer you a job, in person. That's why you're here today …

-HAL: Daniel Faye, General Manager and Founder of …

-Tom: Yes HAL, I know who he is, enter pause mode until further notice.

-HAL: Ok