I watched this movie on Boingboing about the “Sixth Sense” project by the MIT Media Lab and Pranav Mistry in particular. It shows a device which allows you to interact with your surroundings and gather meta / contextual information from it. You don’t have to interact with other people since you’ll carry your omnipotent device to ask questions. This is not so far from the way some people interact with their smartphone, which seems to become more and more powerful. The “sixth sense” prototype  is in my opinion ‘just’ an ubersmartphone. From a technical perspective I find it not quite as interesting as the questions it raises from a social, economical and environmental perspective.

Questions such as: how do we interact with our environment? Are we able to make more informed decisions if we have more information available? Will this have an impact on human-human relations and what kind of impact?  My ambivalent thoughts on this device thus far may be best summed up in these two quotes:

“The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed”

William Gibson (science fiction author)

“Resistance is futile”

The Borg (a race of aliens in the fictional universe of Startrek)

We live in interesting times.

ps: I embedded the movie at the rear of this post.