In a message dated 4/6/00 12:24:23 AM Central Daylight Time, spike66@ibm.net
writes:
> Easy question, now consider we are
> about to see the next round with the wearable computers. It
> is 1980 all over again. Then it was the new desktop computers.
> Now it is the palm pilots and their logical descendants the
> wearables. Getting these gadgets and learning to use them
> will divide the haves from the have nots even more than now.
> Right? You and I are cool with that because we are the techies.
> I hope one of our sociologist gurus will speculate on where it
> all leads.
I'm no "sociological guru", but I sure love to speculate :-) In the short-
and intermediate-term, wearables with really good real-time
reality-augmentation agents could give their users a huge advantage in all
sorts of human activities. They could also cause a kind of mental fatigue
for their users the like of which we've never seen before in human
experience. Feel flooded with information and overwhelmed with the need to
"keep up" with all the channels of communication you have available to you
now? Just wait for the era of true ubiquitous telecommunications.
I wonder whether the ealiest adopters of really capable wearables might not
experience a massive surge in competitive advantage simply because it will
take some time to work out the best balance of info-flow and basic monkey
ability to deal with the dataflood that will be available. Perhaps by the
time the early adopters work out just what a workable interface is like, the
price will be so low that a mass market will be able to afford them - sort of
like what happened with PCs and the web.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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