Imagining a future dictated by Google Glass

We came across an eerily fascinating and scary video, which we invite you to watch before reading on. Done by students of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the video showcases their perception of the future where everyone is constantly wired through augmented reality contact lenses.

The Internet and and social media is cutting us of from the real things in life.

Google “Social Network makes us depressed” and you can find a whole list of studies and articles showing how social media and the obsessions towards internet is making people even more depressed, sad and delusional. As more of us spend more time connected to the web, slowly but surely, we will lose touch with the real things in life. More experiences will be enabled with technology and some of the exciting experiences in life will be replaced by tomorrow’s technology, which we are already seeing happening: Indoor Skydiving or even the Project Glass by Google. If the Project Glass by Google is accessible to everyone, everything you see in the vimeo video earlier will become a reality.

Online profiles will set the tone of our first date

As illustrated in the Sight Vimeo video, we are all interconnected through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and we are already seeing people finding their Mr and Mrs Right through social media channels. Blackbox research recently published its infographic which revealed that almost 50 percent of Singaporeans use their online social networks to find Mrs. or Mr. Right. The days where one spend time knowing one another through daily face to face interactions as well as spending time with one another will soon be replaced by data from digital footprints. Couples will soon discover one another based on each other’s “online profiles” as well as compatibility scores and indexes. Online profiles and everything that we post digitally will set the tone of our dates.

Daily tasks will be gamified and skills are accessible through the Internet

With the proliferation of technology through open source projects as well as online collaborative wiki projects, knowledge is made much more accessible than ever before. Google and you can find anything you want from how to build websites, how to launch an ecommerce shop, how to hack, how to repair to even learning new languages. Skills can be easily obtained and as more DIYs as well as guides are published onto the web. Executing tasks will soon be just a matter of copy and pasting. The Sight Vimeo video also illustrated beautifully how the Google Glass will profoundly change the way we carry out tasks such as cooking in our future. Our daily lives will be gamified with badges and achievements and will be used as “social reputations” to impress one another.

Quality programmers and engineers in growing demand

The Sight Vimeo video also illustrated one important point: Programs and technology will take over our lives in the future. For better or worse, it is happening. Therefore, there has been a huge demand around the world towards computer engineers, because these are the people that will shape our future by driving technology innovations. This is also why there has been a huge spawn of websites that teaches programming to anyone who are interested such as Codecademy and Treehouse.

While technology undeniably bring us much more convenience, it is up to us to dictate and decide how it controls our life. If we give too much power to technology and the Internet, we might take its accessibility and convenience for granted and unknowingly let it consume our lives. If one day, we had to ask ourselves when was the last time we physically met our good friends, something is definitely wrong. The students from Jerusalem are sending a message through their augmented reality contact lenses video: we should be careful on how much we let technology control our life. So, nay to Google Glass?

Featured Image Credits: Co.Design