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| English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I think the
Natural User Interface, of which the touch is just the beginning and gesture is the next big step, though not the final step, not by a long shot, is a big gift for all of us, but it might be extra promising for the differently abled. Senior homes can make use of drones and robots. Voice commands would cut
language barriers. The
Internet is not meant for
English only, and should not dump you into your particular language silo. You communicate, let the Internet translate.
The keyboard, if you think about it, does feel unnatural.
The ultimate is being able to command your computing environment with your
eye movements,
Stephen Hawking style.
At some level we are all differently. A lot of start wearing glasses early on. As soon as you put one on, you have gently stepped into the differently abled zone. Smart, robotic limbs are not a challenge anymore. They are not innovation challenges, they are simply now scaling challenges.
Your brain is one of the last parts of your body to give up on you. Which means the NUI taken to its logical conclusion will allow us to raise the retirement age. And since retirement is voluntary anyways, a lot of us could hope to live long productive lives through NUI.
Education remains the great unsolved mystery of our knowledge age, ironically. The
industrial era education engines/structures don't recognize concepts like people learn at their own paces with their own styles. That individualization is now possible. But there are old institutional structures that get in the way.
There are enormous implications on education and health because a
knowledge economy puts a major, unprecedented emphasis on
human capital. Human capital is a concept much bigger than human rights because it takes human rights for granted.
