Future Tech Still A Way Behind The 80s |
Posted: July 25, 2017 |
It’s been four years since Google Glass launched, heralded at the time as a giant leap forward for the emerging wearable tech trend. Thanks to widespread mocking from a wary and inherently cynical buying public, things never really panned out for Glass as a viable commercial product the first time around, and it was effectively withdrawn in 2015. Today though, its developers are gearing up for a second stab at greatness with the Glass 2.0 ‘Enterprise Edition’, aimed chiefly at streamlining the production process for industrial workers. In fact, wearable tech is one area in which some of the most impressive leaps towards the future are being made right now, and many of the products planned are already making the whole Glass concept look dated. Numerous companies, for example, have already filed patents for blink-operated contact lenses that shoot photos, record video and overlay graphical data across the wearer’s field of vision; just the latest iteration of so-called ‘augmented reality’ tech that has already been explored to varying degrees of success via innumerable smartphone apps. Speaking of smartphone apps, we’ve just developed a nano-hologram unit that could theoretically fit inside today’s handsets. Not too shabby. For a certain generation though, the very mention of ‘future technology’ will always evoke some sort of Marty McFly fantasy involving whizzing around on a hoverboard. Regrettably, we have some way still to go in terms of shrinking down that sort of gadgetry to fit under anything as portable as a skate deck (no matter how convincing some recent hoaxes may have seemed!). However, fans of 1980s movie futurism will doubtless thrill to hear that the Kitty Hawk Flyer – an ultralight aircraft that resembles a cross between a miniature hovercraft and a rideable jetpack, and that performs vertical take-offs and landings – is due to go on general sale later this year. There’s been no price announced yet by the Larry Page-backed development company, but it certainly won’t be a pocket money sort of deal when they finally do hit the stores. Still, while undoubtedly very neat, the Kitty Hawk Flyer looks downright clunky as a harbinger of the rapidly arriving future – especially when compared to some of the other, less attention-grabbing minor miracles currently undergoing a rather quieter development process. Indeed, a German company has already filed patents for a range of 3D printed foods as a way to give gel-based nutrition (aimed at people who have difficulty chewing and swallowing) a variety of more appetising forms. Pretty amazing…but it’s not a hoverboard, is it? Happily, for those of us raised on a diet of The Jetsons, there’s still plenty of attention being paid to futuristic lifestyle technologies. This year’s Paris Air Show, for instance, featured advanced designs for a giant supersonic airliner, while astounding new concepts for ‘smart’ roads and buildings are increasingly blowing up the scale of what we’re (slowly) getting used to calling the Internet Of Things. And, possibly even closer to reality, the race to produce fully operational driverless cars is still being very hotly contested. Come to think of it, given how far we’ve progressed in many more improbable areas of future tech, it seems surprising that self-driving cars haven’t already become part of our everyday lives. But, as is the case with so many cutting-edge developments, the very concept of driverless vehicles is currently being held back by the very thing that has made them a near-reality: people. That’s right. You’re the reason you still have to shift gear on the drive to work. The problem is, we’ve already got to the point where driverless cars could work perfectly fine in theory – so long as they’re the only type of vehicle on the road. But, as Uber’s 2016 pilot program roll-out exposed, existing driverless technologies still face significant issues in attempting to function alongside manual road users.
To date, driverless car development has thus far been focused on reaching various levels of autonomy; we’ve already succeeded in trialling level 2 vehicles, defined by SAE International as cars that are able to accelerate, hold a lane position and decelerate automatically. However, this still requires a degree of rapid-response human input to override the controls in the event of another road user confusing the driverless AI. Unfortunately for us, tests have consistently shown we’re not good enough at that to make level 2 autonomy a satisfactory compromise for widespread use. And yet reaching level 3 – defined as the car having basic decision-making abilities, such that the driver can safely be ‘eyes-off’ for the vast majority of a journey – remains a pretty colossal leap forward in both complexity and cost. In other words, the development of autonomous vehicles is currently being hamstrung by many of the same challenges that have kept hoverboards levitating just out of reach for so long. We’re almost there with the hardware, but we basically can’t be trusted to operate it very well.
The cruellest irony here, of course, is one faced by so many tech innovators: the AI required for smooth integration of driverless cars alongside traditional, human-controlled vehicles is far more advanced than it would need to be in a future where all cars were self-driving. Or, to look at it another way, if humans were better at bridging the gaps that technology can’t quite fill yet then we’d all be progressing a lot more quickly – but we’re just as notoriously bad at integrating with the tech as the tech is at integrating with us. Hardly surprising, then, that the Kitty Hawk Flyer is still a long way from being the hoverboard of our dreams: due to FAA concerns, it’ll only be approved for short flights over water at first, rather than being commonplace anywhere near populated areas of dry land. Unless you happen to work in the middle of a deserted pond, it seems your Doc Brown-inspired futuristic fantasy world won’t be materialising quite yet.
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