For a long time when I normally had with rental cars on the road, this time I took the bus to Union Hall when I arrived by plane in October of this year in Cork, Ireland. After some time I noticed a monitor in the front that showed the passengers, what the driver is seeing, using a built-in video camera. The camera is perhaps already a webcam and the bus company can always follow in real time, how the bus is traveling and what is happening on the road, from the perspective of the bus driver. Such real-time views could also be made available to any Internet user, who wants to find out about a bus.
As we have mentioned in the outline/extended abstract, chapter 1 of table 6 of our WorldCafe http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=252, this will also be the State-of-the-Art of our cars in the near future, so the family or other authorized persons can see what Dad is seeing when driving far from home. And so on.
According to Moore's Law and Ray Kurzweil's forecast of the Accelerating Returns the next generation of "cool glasses" will have an integrated webcam, available for everybody who wants to look via the eyes of your Darling who is travelling on the other side of the earth (first prototype from 2006 already, see http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/703/64/), especially when we have solved the still existing limitations of the current Internet within the next years (http://ipv6-ghent.fi-week.eu/program/). Of course we will add a lot of apps like "let me see this in pink, please" and much more fancy stuff.
What it means, is that we will be able to look with the eyes of other people, of one or even more persons or of vehicles, at the same time and in real time. In the sense of Cyborgs, we will a bit later implant such a more miniaturized webcam and all these technologies directly in the eyes of humans - same what we do today with botox or heart pacemakers or eye lasering.
Augmented Reality 3.0
In September 2010, experts have at the first Munich Conference "insideAR" new developments in the AR-technology discussed. AR stands for Augmented Reality - the superimposition of images or videos on mobile devices with virtual objects and additional information.
http://www.metaio.com/index.php?id=1103
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
The following video belongs to a series of AR-videos: Innovators, Episode 6, Part 2 of 4: Augmenting Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHzjTiAb68&feature=player_embedded#!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANpzCJHcvU&feature=player_embedded#!
As we see, actually already today we are always connected to the whole knowledge of the Internet via smartphones, just envisaging something like the famous Stonebridge of my home city of Regensburg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Regensburg_-_Steinerne_Bruecke_ohne_Dom.jpg and we will listen what the Internet knows about it, e.g. http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http ... CC8Q9QEwAQ, when and how built, etc. and we will be able to use - physically via HET - all the features you see from the videos like mobile tracking, extensible tracking, 3D content, prototyping and so on.
This means that in the near future - "2020 and Beyond" - we will always "physically" be connected online to the whole knowledge from the Internet, enhanced and combined with a lot of more features or apps. This will have a dramatic impact regarding our school and university systems. We must already today invent new education systems which anticipate this near future, and there are already research programs for that in the sense of live-long learning, virtual courses of study, Technology Enhanced Learning, on the basis of experts from all over the world, whose expertises are not available at a single university or even in a single country (e.g. see http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/___FP7-ICT-2009-5_IP_CloudBox-edBPM.pdf, project was not started), but we need much more "futuristic" and visionary concepts (e.g. in order to realize a new course of study about Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/Book-Ubiquitous%20Complex%20Event%20Processing.pdf, as also discussed with good friend Opher Etzion http://epthinking.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-specialized-graduate-degree-programs.html). We must not learn or teach "facts" anymore, but we have to learn how to use and combine them and how to use the accordant Human Enhancement Technologies, how to react on complex combinations of facts, data or complex events and how to solve problems accordingly.
We will combine AR with U-CEP and how to react on complex event patterns including triggering or managing pre-modelled (business) processes, and the future challenge for "2020 and Beyond" will be to model such processes related to such event patterns.
For instance, in the case of the next, allegedly heavy solar storm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html or http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/15/how-to-survive-a-solar-storm we cannot say when exactly it will happen 2012/2013 or also a bit earlier, we only know that it will come, but cannot predict how it will hit our planet exactly. There are different worst case scenarios, e.g. from the NASA. When we observe and detect the event patterns of a just erupted solar storm, we would have only seconds to react. Our U-CEP based HET would alert us, perhaps would automatically prevent or block us to use elevators, to leave trains or other electrically driven vehicles, that all aircarfts would be grounded in the next minutes, etc. perhaps it would alert us - all based on pre-modelled processes - that our navigation system would not work shortly, also not our smartphone and so on, and even all our HET based Cyborg abilities would fail and also these presently alerting U-CEP based HET's, and the alerting system could warn us that we should be prepared to be "normal" humans again as long as the solar storm happens or the damages of our power grids etc. would not be repaired for hours, perhaps days, perhaps weeks or even longer - according to the mentioned scenarios. But in some years or decades, we wouldn't be able to be normal humans anymore (except perhaps the Amazonas indians and similar guys who would only see great lightning on the sky), so we must already today think about this fragile future based on volatile abilities and about how to survive without HET's.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= ... =1&theater
The problem with the evolution
The problem with the evolution is that the humans and their brains are still on the level of 50.000 years ago and the performance of a human brain does allegedly still process 120.000 events per second unconsciously and less than 10 consciously or logically. What will happen when we connect the humans to much more event types and event instances? What would happen if other or "traditional, normal" events would be hidden or superimposed by the new ones? Do we need an exocortex for that? And should the recognitions or results of the exocortex be mapped as input in such a way that our brain would understand them? Or should the exocortex control and manage our physical body without our "Free Will" and automatically, because we would not be able to react fast enough (as already in the case of the "autobrake" of our Intelligent Cars mentioned above)? A lot of interdisciplinary research is needed within the next decades, as we'll start such a cooperation between the focused tables of our WorldCafe of the mentioned workshop, Gent 13 Dec 2010 http://www.lswn.it/en/workshops/2010/from_event_driven_business_process_management_to_ubiquitous_complex_event_processing.
We also intend to contribute with our ideas to the workshop and book project about "Autonomous Cyborgs - Artificial bodies and artificial agents in the technological society" http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=14942.