The Extensions of Man

The first video in this post was originally found in Roger Ebert's recent, online journal entry, "The human race on a key ring." Read it here.

Patti Maes - "Sixth Sense" demonstration

The "controversial" feature presented in this demonstration of the "Sixth Sense" (at approximately 06:45) is hilarious, but I'm slightly creeped out by its implications.


Alarums have long been raised about the "obsolescence" of human memory in the age of digital information. Just last week, MSN.com featured an article on its homepage with the tagline: "Is Memorization Dead?" Most people I know can't remember all the phone numbers of their family and friends by heart. That information is stored onto their various communication devices which they can retrieve at the push of a button so that they don't have to remember them. The same with data of other sorts. We Google it.

What if the same practice were extended to our memory recall of the people in our lives? Can you imagine human relationships and conversations deteriorating to the point where the only way we can remember who the other person is is through "cloud tags" (bite-sized labels like the ones appended to this blog post). Or how artificial the context of human conversations would become if to break the ice, we resorted to consulting the "interests" section on their MySpace page as we're speaking to the other person? I won't mention the awkwardness that would ensue if for some reason, the projected text is undecipherable on certain types of clothing. "Um, can you take off your shirt so I can read your stats better?" Kids perceiving the world like an unholy amalgamation of Geordi La Forge and the Chris Anderson character in "Minority Report"? The streets overrun with broods of genetically engineered android children...I'll stop there.



Two things that would benefit from multi-touch, user-interface technology: music production and film editing. Make it so. (These Star Trek references are completely unintentional. Honestly.)