I keep thinking about the inevitable exponential growth of technology and how it relates to CPU Processing power, Storage capabilities and Data transmission speeds, and then I ask myself what would I do with technology 1 billion times more powerful than the one we have.
If you haven’t noticed, things are getting really powerful, really tiny, and really fast already.
And companies like Google are starting to show hints of what should be done with all these.
Look at the new Google Maps, it’s pretty amazing, and it’s only going to get better.
When you interview at Google there’s one question that keeps coming to you almost from all the people that drill you “How would you make the internet faster?”
It seems Google’s answer is to take over the internet at every layer, they have indexed it like nobody else, they’ve created a browser that’s now taken the majority of the market share and made it really fast, they’ve built application layer protocols faster than HTTP (SPDY), they’ve also seen the exponential adoption of mobile devices and created an operating system for it, and devices for it, and more recently they’re even providing internet access at Gigabit speeds one small city at the time (which is all an experiment for what’s to come)
Then you see them experimenting with very primitive versions of wearable computers (Glass) and if you start putting the pieces together, for example, they were crazy enough to have cars driving around the world to have “Street View” in Google maps… how on earth would you be able to go all the way and digitize reality itself? You put computers on people’s heads and record everything into digital information.
I can see a future where Google will be able to ask you to record whatever you see around you, inside or outside a building, they’ll have your position, your orientation, and best of all, since there will be so many of us willing to collaborate in exchange of some stupid incentive (or perhaps none), they will be able to record reality from almost any angle possible to have a full representation of reality, perhaps even in real time, I think these are the kinds of things that are possible when you have incredibly fast CPUs, incredibly huge storage, and incredibly fast transmission speeds when you have incredibly ubiquitous internet access (remember that Balloon project?)
And that’s just what this little mortal has thought of in relationship to their Google Maps product.
I think Google Glass and an application of this sort will bring forth interesting legal challenges, like, what if you don’t want the inside of your home or office to be in google? how do you prevent anyone from capturing everything and making it public?
Other scary applications that I see possible are real-time face recognition coming from a Google Glass facebook app, then the name “facebook” will really make sense. And best of all, a lot of people (after major debate and laws have been passed with respect of not being scannable by strangers) will actually want to be recognized by strangers, maybe there will be social benefits to complete unanimity, it will all be really interesting.