14 DAY TRIAL // Looks like IBM really wants to take the fiction out of Science Fiction and turn it into Science Fact instead.
Many people are probably familiar with the concept of technopathy, basically the ability to control technology with a thought, or a few thoughts depending on context.
It so happens that this, among other things, is precisely what IBM hopes to make possible over the next five years.
Granted, it won't so much be technopathy (a person's ability to control technology) as much as technology with the ability to recognize what people think it should do.
IBM researchers are exploring means of connecting the human mind to smartphones and computers.
Bioinformatics headsets, with the ability to recognize users' facial expressions and read electrical brain activity, are something that the company has been working on for a while already.
They should be ready to make their mark on the gaming and entertainment industry in about five years.
The principle should make its way to other technological applications as well.
Eventually, phone calls should be possible to initiate just by thinking about it and computers should know what to do much in the same manner.
IBM also thinks that it doesn't have to take long for the industry to reach the point where computers can use eye-sensing and voice recognition for data access purposes.
Passwords would come to be replaced by biometric authentication.
Considering that, by 2017, about 80% of the world's population will have at least one mobile device, all of these features could help revolutionize the whole world even further.
That said, IBM provided an official video in which it describes these and more of its initiatives, like recycling energy, be it kinetic (walking, jogging, cycling) or capturing the heat from computers, then using it to power homes, workplaces and even entire cities.
Self-powered homes will essentially make some of the most troublesome bills go away forever, so if the whole mind-controlled thing extends to appliances, futuristic homes won't qualify as futuristic any longer, being reality at last.
Now we just have to hope our brains remain read-only.
