By Christopher Mims
It's 2027, and you're walking down the street, confident you'll
arrive at your destination even though you don't know where it is.
You may not even remember why your device is telling you to go
there.
There's a voice in your ear giving you turn-by-turn directions
and, in between, prepping you for this meeting. Oh, right, you're
supposed to be interviewing a dog whisperer for your pet-psychiatry
business. You arrive at the coffee shop, look around quizzically,
and a woman you don't recognize approaches. A display only you can
see highlights her face and prints her name next to it in crisp
block lettering, Terminator-style. Afterward, you'll get an
automatically generated transcript of everything the two of you
said.
As the iPhone this week marks the 10th anniversary of its first
sale, it remains one of the most successful consumer products in
history. But by the time it celebrates its 20th anniversary, the
"phone" concept will be entirely uprooted: That dog-whisperer
scenario will be brought to you even if you don't have an iPhone in
your pocket.
Sure, Apple may still sell a glossy rectangle. (At that point,
iPhones may also be thin and foldable, or roll up into scrolls like
ancient papyri.) But the suite of apps and services that is today
centered around the physical iPhone will have migrated to other,
more convenient and equally capable devices -- a "body area
network" of computers, batteries and sensors residing on our
wrists, in our ears, on our faces and who knows where else. We'll
find ourselves leaving the iPhone behind more and more often.
Trying to predict where technology will be in a decade may be a
fool's errand, but how often do we get to tie up so many emerging
trends in a neat package?
Apple is busy putting ever more powerful microprocessors, and
more wireless radios, in every one of its devices. Siri is getting
smarter and popping up in more places. Meanwhile Apple is going
deep on augmented reality, giving developers the ability to create
apps in which our physical world is filled with everything from
Pokémon to whatever IKEA furniture we want to try in our living
rooms. All these technologies -- interfacing with our smart homes,
smart cars, even smart cities -- will constitute not just a new way
to interact with computers but a new way of life. And of course,
worrisome levels of privacy invasion.
Apple's acquisitions -- it buys a company every three to four
weeks, Chief Executive Tim Cook has said -- tend to be highly
predictive of its future moves. Since it first bought Siri in 2010,
Apple has continued to make acquisitions in artificial intelligence
-- Lattice Data, Turi and Perceptio among them, all of which
specialize in some form of machine learning. The company is
reportedly working on its own chips for AI.
Apple's preview of iOS 11, with deeper integration of Siri than
ever, suggests it hopes to make Siri capable of doing nearly
everything on an iPhone that we currently do through its touch
interface.
Apple has also made many acquisitions related to augmented
reality -- the overlay of computer interfaces and three-dimensional
objects on a person's view of the real world -- including
Primesense and Metaio. Mr. Cook has said he is so excited about AR
he wants to " yell out and scream."
By 2027, the problem of bulky AR headsets like Microsoft's
HoloLens should be solved, which means Apple and others are likely
to release some sort of smart eyeglasses. With their ability to
convincingly supplement our visual and auditory reality, delivering
information at the time and place most appropriate, they'll
occasion a cultural change as big as the introduction of the
smartphone itself.
"What you're going to see with all this augmentation is the
psychology of using your phone could change dramatically," says
Ryan Walsh, a partner at venture-capital firm Floodgate who from
2014 to 2016 directed product management for media at Apple.
"Instead of using your phone to get away from the world, you'll use
it to join in the world in a much deeper and more meaningful way,"
he says.
Augmented reality and artificial intelligence will also benefit
from the Internet of Things trend: everyday gadgets getting
sensors, actuators and a wireless internet connection. Apple
controls smart-home products with HomeKit. It aggregates health
information with HealthKit, and ties in the car (CarPlay), cash
register (Apple Pay) and even the StairMaster (GymKit). Apple
clearly wants its devices to connect to everything on Earth.
With our every action mapped to every outdoor and indoor space
we inhabit -- combined with the predictive power of AI and
distributed across a suite of devices for which Siri has become the
default interface -- the result could be a life directed by our
gadgets, a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" for our daily
routines.
At first, this will be straightforward. Having automatically
filled our calendars using the kind of scheduling AI that already
exists, our devices will direct us from one task to another, even
suggesting transportation -- ridesharing, mass transit or flying
car. But the relationship will change as the AI gets to know more
about you.
"You might be walking by someplace and it might tell you, 'Hey,
you should go in here, they make a great cup of coffee and there's
also this person you really would like, too'," says Jonathan
Badeen, co-founder and chief strategy officer of dating app Tinder,
where he leads teams that think about how to incorporate Apple's
latest technology into apps.
By 2027, Apple and its competitors will also have cemented a
world of tradeoffs: If you want your life enhanced by AI and all
the rest of this tech, you're going to have to submit to constant
surveillance -- by your devices or, in many cases, by the tech
giants themselves. Apple's bet is that you will trust it to do
this: The company's privacy stance is that it isn't going to look
at or share your data, and it will be encrypted so others can't
look at it, either.
Getting used to that won't be easy. Just as getting in a
stranger's car or sleeping in a stranger's home seemed crazy before
Uber and Airbnb, the 2027 iPhone's most important differentiator
may be our willingness to accept things we can't even fathom
today.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 25, 2017 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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