Category: Future

Read about Adedeji Olowe’s take about the future, futurism, and other technologies that could transform the everyday lives for better and sometimes for worse.

The end of the world is holographic and unreal

Ok, I’m an armchair futurist but I’m not ashamed of that at all. How could one be ashamed of the progress Microsoft has with HoloLens? That sh*t simply blows the mind away!

Yeah, my mind got blown with the scary realities of VR and I haven’t been able to find the pieces since.

In a nutshell, HoloLens turns the VR world upside down by overlaying holograms on the everyday objects around us. It is easier to understand by starting here and then watching a live demo here.

This may be more useful for the everyday people like you and me while Oculus Rift is suited for core gamers. The possibilities are endless though – education, business, entertainment, porn, etc.

You don’t know what I’m ranting about? Leave, you don’t belong here!

The real independence is from PHCN

October 1 is regarded as our national independence day although I’m not so sure if we are really free. The British may have gone but PHCN is still around, in some transformed way.

I was reading about the latest upset planned by Elon Musk and I had a good smile. Today, my day is made. Could I end up having a total energy independence? That is, if I could afford it. Before then, a little story.
One of the few luxuries I have been able to enjoy in this country is constant electricity. I know it sounds crazier than your cousin having a bubble bath right in the middle of Sahara Desert.

So where do I live? In some random part of Lagos! I live in a little enclave that happens to have a very bad electricity problem. Apart from the madness induced electricity given by the local utility, the estate itself has perennial problem of poor utility management that ensures that darkness is a constant factor.

But I’m in one of the rapidly expanding Nigerian club that discovered energy storage, popularly called inverters. I bet someone around you has it and it’s getting so popular that I expect it to supplant “I better pass my neighbor” soon. For a few friends that I have gotten on this bus, their greatest regret has always been getting inverters too late. Inverter has gone from nerdish to mainstream.
However, there is a catch, you still need to have some bits of electricity from the utilities or your generator to have this going. It doesn’t eliminate most of your cost or sometimes of your inconveniences but boy, it does a good job of hypertension alleviation!

What if I could invest some cash into solar panels and pair that with my inverter, could it be possible that I could snip of my wires?

The cost of solar panels is rapidly going down although the Naira exchange rate is making a mess of everything. But let’s say solar gets to a decent price point, going independent might be worth it. The biggest cost savings wouldn’t come from utilities bill but from cost of buying, fueling and maintaining generators. Lord have mercy!

So back to Elon Musk. His SolarCity wants to install up to 1GW of panels along with batteries over the next few months. Is my hope on Mr. Musk? Hell no.

Actually I’m hoping that this will spur copycats with price war, all the way to the bottom. Currently at today’s Naira, I need to shell out as much as N1.5M for a 5KW solar panels which isn’t a priority now. What happens if competition, innovation and business drives this down to N100K?

Think about it.

Hacking your way into the company of gods

Lucy was a thoroughly shitty movie. It was so bad I was physically restrained at the cinemas from crawling into the screen and giving everyone an uppercut; not even Scarlett Johansson could distract me.

Ok, that wasn’t possible but my-my, I wish I could.

The deeper narrative wasn’t lost on me, though – humanity has forever daydreamed about making itself better, go above the laws of physics, and just become a nuisance to the neighbors. Maybe that’s why we invented religion. That’s another story entirely.

Let’s be frank; we have tried – we have flown five times faster than the speed of a crying baby’s wail, gone to the moon and back, we have smartphones, and oh, Nigeria even dealt with Ebola! But we are still unsatisfied. We want to be gods!

Meanwhile, I sat here at my desk wondering how my dull day would end and then bumped into an interesting article at The Verge. Not the usual place the normal guys crawl, but that’s my joint.

It’s estimated that about 100,000 unlucky souls today are plumbed with electrical impulses to fight pain and depression (you could have Bovi come around to make you forget your sorry life for half the price of the surgery). However, what if we go beyond making a sad man laugh and decide to augment our mental abilities? What if a consistent set of interfaces and protocols come into play that would allow us to tweak memory, maturity, reactions, or maybe someone would be able to reverse intelligence and give some of the dull people I know a bit of smart for a try?

It is scary to think about the significance of this. At first, I was an advocate of enhancing our body with bionic parts – smart eyes that can read the news and all that sh*t and ears that could discern gist from a mile off. This is bigger; this is godliness at the photonic level!

By the way, woe betides you if your brain crashes, freezes of gets Dosed by Chinese hackers.

There is a time when I wanted tech advancement just for the sake of it, but for the first time, I’m scared out of my pink boxers and afraid of what humans could do to humanity. Let me be out of here before Putin gets this done.

Time for the long drive home; where are my car keys? Damn, I need a brain implant.

The end is nigh. Artificial Intelligence

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Like an errant kid the world is surely bent on killing itself. This time around even the cockroaches won’t be spared.

If you think that someone is going to throw a nuclear bomb, think about it, who wants to die when MAD (mutually assured destruction) is a known consequence? Not even a super power wants to be an overlord of a nuclear wasteland.

Technology is advancing at such a rapid clip that one day we are going to reach what is called Singularity – that point when the line between man and machine is blurred beyond recognition. Or worse still when machine blurs out the memory of men.

Think about it, once you do a machine that can make itself better, the end is nigh. And this is possible. While at the university my project was on genetic algorithm and I coded a simple program that increasingly makes itself increasingly better. So imagine smart guys coding a software that can recode itself better and better each day. One day it would be smarter than human and we are all going to have new overlords.

Watch Transcendence and see what is possible. It is not a joke. Trust me, Terminator would be a Mickey Mouse to what could happen. Time travel is another thing though.

Some scientists are already talking about this and for the first time top minds are calling attention of the world leaders on what could be humanity’s last invention. You never know maybe we human are some inventions that went awry in the past. For Christians, even the bible pointed to it at Genesis 6:6.

Truth is a smart machines first move would be to wipe humanity off. We are bad and mean to each other. We destroy the environment. We waste resources.

Sometimes I can’t argue if we don’t really deserve this fate?
Along the line, a smart benevolent machine could dig up our DNA and restore memories. Would they invent emotions? Will they end up organic? Will they have aspirations? Will they study the past?

Just wondering what I could ask this machine when it finally takes over – what is your purpose? It’s probably going to make a nasty grunt, twitch its digital nose and reach for CRTL-ALT-DEL.
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