A touchy truth

I was looking at laptops again over the weekend. I realise that a lot of manufacturers are now opting for touch interfaces, instead of the old tactile ones that we have become accustomed to. Gone are the good old button bashing days. This made me start thinking that the current craze of our generation is being ‘touchy’. This started with the I-phone and several me too wannabe’s followed.
In truth is touch such a great thing. Is it as reliable the age old button? Touch screen phones for examples can’t compete with full QWERTY phones. Yet we now have ‘multi-touch’ keypads on laptops. I still can’t figure out how useful that will be. True the next version of Windows is supposed to support it, and in Windows vista the two finger drag acts similar to holding the ctrl key down and scrolling, but what is the big deal?
On the plus side, for the fans of Star Trek the Next Generation, maybe we can expect some kind of futuristic ‘L-Cars’ interface system becoming possible. And if we take a bigger leap, Minority Report like gesture interfaces are unlikely to be in minority in the years ahead!

Technological Evolution

What is the next step in human evolution? The thought struck my mind when my trusted R-52 Laptop finally decided to give up on me. The loss resulted in me checking out and reading about laptops and netbooks. I decided to venture forth to a nearby store and took a gander at typing out the age old ‘Quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog’ on a couple of new laptops.

The two netbooks in my consideration were the most popular models from Lenovo and HP. What struck me at first was the reduced keyboard. My typing test lead me to believe that the HP was more suited for typing out stuff, the Lenovo being a little bit cramped. In the laptop segment I am eyeing Sony’s new budget Viao which has a nicely spread out keyboard and HP’s DV6 apart from Lenovo (due to my trusty think pad).

All this leads to me to wonder how is the human race going to evolve in the near future. Years ago, if a person walked down the street talking to himself he was likely to have a date with a padded cell. Today I see society completely content with others talking to thin air as they have Bluetooth devices concealed under curly locks.

With keyboards shrinking in size are we going to evolve into having shorter hands and if everything is voice activated in the future then maybe our hands as we know it are going to devolve. I remember watching the TV show Star Trek Voyager where one of the crew members is exposed to something that makes him evolve quickly eventually turning into some kind of lizard, along with Captain Janeway.

Lets hope technology is a catalyst for positive evolution and not degeneration in the years ahead. The leaps and bounds in prosthetics (pun intended) is a great example of that positive first step. At the end of the day we have a choice that determines how we evolve.

The Economics of Technological Development

I was leafing through the latest issue of the Economist and I came across a startling discovery. Apparently in North America a lot of people pay for incoming calls! This seemed to be a throwback to the archaic days when cell phones were a luxury. In India this thought is now absurd (unless you are on roaming.)

This made me start thinking, its not that man fails to progresses technologically. It is how fast mankind adopts new technology, how fast it becomes economically viable for a technology to percolate to the grass roots level of society.

We often hear the whisper of next generation fuel sources, electric cars and hybrids and though they have started testing these cars in the US, it is far from becoming a reality for the common man. We are still dependent on fossil fuels now matter how long strides we have taken in alternative fuel sources. It is not that we lack the know-how as the human race. It is because we lack the economics to grow fast enough. For man to innovate he needs to research and that costs time and money. Basic economics. 101 - exhaustive research and effort is expensive hence adopting a technology is also expensive. Yes we can delve into marketing mumbo jumbo about early adopters and product pricing and how this is profitable for the companies but I won’t touch upon that here.

The question I ask you is take Arthur C Clarke and his vision of the future. 2001 has come and gone and 2010 is at our doorsteps, yet man fails to have achieved space travel on the scale Clarke envisioned (the Virgin Galactic Space Ship One is a step in the right direction). Similarly how is the human race going to progress technologically in leaps and bounds when cutting edge technology is under wraps because of defence applications or other commercial applications is so expensive. Robotics is an excellent example. There are so many intelligent robotic toys – Robo Sapiens being a popular toy being sold. Yet we can’ t afford to have a robot in our homes even if Honda started manufacturing them as butler or nannies an I-Robot future is still very distant.

The solution? Your guess is as good as mine. Where is our next big disruptive innovation that’s going to solve this technological and economical problem? Should we be entering into the next generation of technological communism? In a sense that’s what Open Source is all about isn’t? Developing things faster in a free manner thereby reducing the burden on the end consumer. For now I can just be glad that tariffs based on technology, as in the case of cellular phones is definitely looking better in India than overseas.