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Communication
Translating telephone technology
where you speak in English and your
Japanese friend hears you in Japanese,
and vice versa, is commonly used for
many language pairs.
Telephone communication is pri-marily
wireless, and routinely includes
high-resolution moving images.
Meetings of all kinds and sizes rou-tinely
take place among geographically
separated participants.
The average household has more
than 100 computers, most of which
are embedded in appliances and built-in
communication systems. Household
robots have emerged, but are not yet
fully accepted.
Intelligent roads are in use, primari-ly
for long-distance travel. Once your
car's computer guidance system locks
onto the control sensors on one of
these highways, you can sit back and
relax. Local roads, though, are still
predominantly conventional.
Health and medicine
Bioengineered treatments have
reduced the toll from cancer, heart dis-ease,
and a variety of other health
problems. Telemedicine is widely used.
Physicians can examine patients using
visual, auditory, and haptic examina-tion
from a distance. Health clinics
with relatively inexpensive equipment
and a single technician bring health
care to remote areas where doctors
had previously been scarce.
The computer itself
Computers are now largely invisible.
They are embedded everywhere—in
walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothing,
jewelry, and bodies.
People communicate with computers
the same way they would communicate
with a human assistant, both verbally
and through visual expression. Users
can model the personality of their
intelligent assistants on actual persons,
including themselves, or select a com-bination
of traits from a variety of both
public personalities and private friends
and associates.
The computational capacity of a
$4,000 computing device (in 1999 dol-lars)
is approximately equal to the
computational capability of the human
brain (20 million billion calculations
per second).
Disabilities
Blind persons routinely use eyeglass-mounted
reading-navigation systems,
which incorporate the new, digitally
controlled, high-resolution optical sen-sors.
Deaf persons routinely read what
other people are saying through lens
displays. Generally, disabilities such as
blindness, deafness, and paraplegia are
not noticeable and are not regarded as
significant.
Health and medicine
Many of the life processes encoded in
the human genome, which was decod-ed
more than ten years earlier, are now
largely understood, along with the
information-processing mechanisms
underlying aging and degenerative con-ditions
such as cancer and heart dis-ease.
The expected life span has
increased to over 100.
Computerized health monitors built
into watches, jewelry, and clothing are
widely used, to diagnose both acute
and chronic health conditions. In addi-tion
to diagnosis, these monitors pro-vide
a range of remedial recommenda-tions
and interventions.
Education
Human learning is primarily accom-plished
using virtual teachers and is
enhanced by the widely available neural
implants. The implants improve memo-ry
and perception, but it is not yet possi-ble
to download knowledge directly.
Computers have read all available
human and machine-generated litera-ture
and multimedia material.
Business and economics
The human population has leveled off
in size and around 12 billion real per-sons.
The basic necessities of food, shel-ter,
and security are available for the
vast majority of the human population.
There is almost no human employ-ment
in production, agriculture, and
transportation. The largest profession is
education. There are many more
lawyers and doctors.
Politics and society
A sharp division no longer exists
between the human world and the
machine world. Human cognition is
being ported to machines, and many
machines have personalities, skills,
and knowledge bases derived from
the reverse engineering of human
intelligence.
There is no longer any clear distinction
between humans and computers. Even
among those human intelligences still
using carbon-based neurons, there is
ubiquitous use of neural-implant tech-nology,
which provides enormous aug-mentation
of human perceptual and
cognitive abilities. Life expectancy is no
longer a viable term in relation to intel-ligent
beings. |
