Kiosk Solutions Apr-May 2016 | Page 45

opinion aren’t we? But typically on the day that the Tesco Labs announce their new Google Glass app Google announce, to some confusion, that Glass has graduated and is moving on. Intel weighs in with their announcement of a new chipset for Glass v2 – so there’s more fun to come, right? For the consumer this is all too confusing. Who would invest more in a headset than they would in a short family holiday when the risk of desertion by the inventors is so high? Some people do invest in fad-tech and always will. It’s those explorers that drive innovation forward. Gesture as the New Normal Slowly in 2015, but with a quickening pace and maddening din, future tech heaves into view. Few would argue that technology is now at the hearts of our lives. We interface with technology in a myriad of ways and this will only become more intense and interesting. Whether we choose to use the Microsoft Kinect, Intel RealSense or Pointswitch to enable gesture in our interactions this takes a leap of faith on the part of the user in training, familiarisation and finally acceptance. Google and the like suggest that technologies that are currently at the bleeding edge, by virtue of their perceived usefulness, will become commonplace. Where yesterdays ‘geeks and freaks’ wore Google Glass, tomorrow this will become the new normal as people like Microsoft bring you the much awaited and heavily cloaked HoloLens. The people of tomorrow are ready for an analogue world augmented with a rich interactive layer of contextually reactive graphics and they will adapt to it with remarkable ease. But does it seem scary to think of artificial intelligence dictating, correcting, interpreting, transmogrifying and representing the real world to you – in real time? Please Cortana, can you stop correcting my grammar? Artificially Unintelligent Stephen Hawkins went on record recently stating that beyond the current level of primitive forms of artificial intelligence lay a development path of full artificial intelligence, which he believes spells doom for mankind. He is not alone in thinking this either. Elon Musk – Space X – sees AI as the biggest existential threat facing mankind in the next five years. OK, but surely we are a long way from this right? I mean we just use a little low-fi AI to enable us to find and buy online. Where’s is the harm in that? Well, remember that Google search engine is arguably the most intelligent algorithm that, we the consumer, are likely to directly interface with. Every time we search and select we teach it a little more about how our minds work and which of the choices put forward present the closest match. It sounds simple, but we’re training this to get better and we are doing this 40,000 times per second! It is the greatest co-created AI project in the history of human kind. Google of the future will be known for AI, deep learning and robotics. The search bar that you currently interface with will be a small part of who they will become. But relax this is not the biggest concern to those technophobes among us. The biggest issue rests with a Deep Learning AI program that can re-write its own source code to become efficient in its own right – no humans required. All we have to do is keep it entrapped in a box and never let it out. Just as long as this does not end up in the hands of defence we should be able to avoid a future Skynet. Oh, but wait… A Common Purpose Technology is really a tool to enable us to achieve greater things and offer more valuable insight that ought to enrich any experience. Please, let’s make sure we don’t scare ourselves to death and miss out on the opportunity to use it to our advantage. We can’t drift aimlessly waiting for opportunity and change to present itself. Sometimes we need to seize the moment and utilise what it has to offer in a common purpose. We owe it to the kids. www.beyondtouch.co.uk KIOSK solutions 45