The best technology in the future will be the one that is invisible to its customers. Take a glance at your surroundings, there are so many electronic devices vying for our attention today that it is difficult to imagine an entire day without them. For some of us an hour may be too much, forget an entire day. Agreed, a ringing phone is a hard thing to ignore, but we have often found ourselves checking our phones for a message that never was. Irrefutably, we have become obsessed with our electronics gadgets because we have been conditioned this way now, to have our attention divided among them all the time.
Is it asking for too much when we say we need smart devices that can be smarter about being passive and non-intrusive? When exactly are we going to see devices that work for themselves and take care of us at the same time without fighting for our attention all the time? The time is right now and this is what innovation is all about. Most people would say that Google Glass is one such device but I have a slightly different opinion about this.
I never really understood how does one cross the road while wearing the Google glass. With several types of information blocking our view, one could be too engrossed to remember where he or she might be at a particular time, and this could lead to an accident. I would not call that smart, or even friendly.
We take almost everything for granted and expect our devices to do all the work for us. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but only if they could do this silently, in a benign way. There are several examples of such technologies already existing. Latest models of automobiles are equipped with several such features that work silently while we commute from one place to another. They leave our attention undivided so that we can focus on driving, while the embedded technology takes care of other things silently. Wipers adjust themselves according to the intensity of the rain; the heater or the air conditioner adjusts the temperature to maintain it at your preferred degrees.
Google acquired a company called the NEST recently for $3.2 billion. The NEST thermostat is an amazing innovation because it can save you money that might have been wasted otherwise, unintentionally. The technology can sense if you are not home and can accordingly turn down the heat to save on the electricity bill. It learns and adjusts itself, without bothering you or reminding you that you need to turn off the thermostat every time you leave the house.
Even the simplest things like the blinds on your windows can be programmed to lower and raise themselves according to the time of the day. Instead of the cumbersome process of raising or lowering them twice or thrice each day manually, you can let the technology behind them to do it for you.
Passive RFID technology may eventually be used in more ways than we initially imagined. From enabling you to pay for your purchases at the supermarket in a secure manner, to attaching a RFID tag to your belongings to keep them from going missing. Invisible RFID tattoos are now being planned for military personnel, which can be used to track and rescue soldiers. The possibilities of such technologies that act on our behalf without actually staring at us all the time are becoming evident each day.
A lot of this also depends upon how gadgets are designed and implemented in the future. There is a fine line between a gadget being passively smart and being overly complex. The features need to be silent but tangible.
