Rapper Tupac Shakur, who died at age 25 in a 1996 shooting, recently made headlines when he appeared on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre at the Coachella 2012 festival. The Tupac “hologram” performed Hail Mary and 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted with Snoop Dogg before dissipating into thin air, leaving the audience in awe, and somewhat unsettled, by the technology used to make the rapper reappear and perform.
The human psyche is highly fragile in the times of stress, and it’s only appropriate to assume that the simulated voices will follow us more and more, just like the GPS in your car telling you to turn around the corner. We must apply tight user experience guidelines to some of these simulations.
It will not take long until most people will be connected most of the time to a set of devices that can read their thought processes and emotions and record what they do and say to whom at the same time.
As the Singularity approaches, the very nature of work and many of the tools we use on a daily basis will change radically. Chances are that most of you reading this article are sitting at something called a desk right now. But what are desks and why do we have them? What is the future of the desk? What about mobile and augmented reality technologies? Can’t they make the very idea of a desk obsolete?
