Future of Mobiles

        Guess Wat? In Future, mobiles might evolve into something that can’t be named ” mobiles “..Find out How?

The short-term future of mobile phones seems to be quite interesting. We are bound to see mobile phones evolve into indispensable multi-utility devices. Your cell phone’s functionality will soon go beyond the PDA, digital camera or music player roles that it serves today. In the future, it will also become your wallet, credit card, car key, home doorway key, or a personal remote control for multiple appliances. It could well be your personal identity as well.

However, the long-term future of mobile phones is even more interesting. Eventually, there will be no mobile phones. Allow me to explain with this story.

Saturation Point

With the current silicon-based manufacturing technology for microprocessors, manufacturers seem to have reached a saturation point in terms of pure clock speed. Take Intel for example—they had promised to deliver the 4 GHz Pentium 4. But after having developed a 3.8 GHz one, they could neither stuff more transistors into the available space nor increase the transistors’ switch-cycles to attain 4 GHz, because of heating issues. To achieve better performance, they decided to put two cores on a single die, and thus the onslaught of dual-core processors began.

A time will come when it will not be feasible to put more cores on a single die. By then, the current silicon-based manufacturing technology will have reached its limits.

Replacement technology

Research is already underway for using lasers to transmit data within a processor, instead of silicon circuits. Of greater interest is research in the field of quantum computing; here the spin of an electron (a sub-atomic particle) is used to store binary information. Presently binary information is represented by switching a transistor on or off (or a flip-flop for a processor) to denote the binary numbers 1 or 0. With quantum computing, unbelievably large reserves of information can be stored in very small spaces.
Another research area is biological computing. Scientists in Japan have already succeeded in encoding 100 bits of information onto a bacterium. All this clearly means that we are constantly moving towards more efficient forms of technology.

Cybernetics

Leaving these aside for a minute, let us look at another area of research in today’s scenario which is undoubtedly regarded as the most dangerous game mankind is playing with itself: Cybernetics. A cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is a living being whose perception and interaction with its surroundings has been significantly changed (read improved) due to some implant(s) in his/her body. Bizarre as it may appear to one’s wildest imagination, the future will inevitably be a world inhabited with cyborgs.

If you Google information on Kevin Warwick, you’ll know. You’ll also discover, in case you still didn’t know, that cyborgs are not just found in science fiction.. They’re an existing reality—living and enjoying it; excited about the future. Professor Kevin Warwick, the world’s first cyborg, has controlled a robotic arm on another continent by moving his own, because of a chip implanted in his arm.

With the advent of Cybernetics, it might be possible that in the future, everybody will be a cyborg. Like millions of computers connected to the Internet today, people will then be interconnected through a worldwide network. They will be computers themselves!

Implants in your body will identify you on this network with your personal details and help you recognize yourself as the citizen of a country. Your birth certificate will only exist in soft form within you; no hard copy document. You will be able to carry out mathematical operations like a computer. You could download information to yourself from the web and upload your experiences onto in. You could save what you physically see and hear as video files. Your bodily implants will protect you from the harsh elements of nature. Your eyes will be able to zoom into faraway objects. You will be able to hear the sounds out of the normal human hearing range. There will be no need to physically move your hands, or to shut your ears to cut out an irritating noise, just mentally switch off your sense of hearing. Your car’s door will open automatically when you approach it.

You could operate appliances without getting up from your chair. When you shake hands with someone, introductions will automatically be exchanged. In fact, one will not have to use ones mouth at all to communicate; more efficient alternatives will be the obvious choice.

This will be beneficial not only because communication will be at the speed of thought (instead of having to verbally speak out long sentences to communicate a small message) but also because you could make others see precisely what you imagine! And of course, if you were good at unethical hacking, you could download and install someone else’s skills in some activity in your own body and become as good as him!

This is enough to declare that there will not be any mobile phones in the distant future. Whatever you will be able to do with a mobile phone even two decades from now, you will be able to do yourself in the long-term future as a cyborg.
You may argue that the very set of implants in your body that will help you communicate can be considered your personal mobile phone; even if there is no physical handset and that the ten-digit numbers might be replaced by names or some unique ”IP addresses”. But I shall now counter-argue that too.

Programmable bodies

Artists create ugly-looking pictures of cyborgs with cables and wires hanging all around their heads and bodies; one eye replaced by a weird-looking camera, a ear replaced with a weird-looking aerial, a whole arm replaced by a robotic one that houses all kinds of screwdrivers and drill-machines. In fact, the whole person looks like the rear panel of an average desktop cabinet.

It is here that the imagination of our present-day seers goes wrong. Recall the replacement technologies discussed earlier in this article. By the time cybernetics and cyborgs are expected to become common, research in quantum and biological computing will have evolved to a stage where companies will start using electrons and biological cells for storing information. This means people might not necessarily have to be implanted with ugly electronic and mechanical devices after all; they might just need to be ”programmed”! Yes, you read that right. The human body has large amounts of both quantum and biological storage and there is a sufficiently powerful electrical field within it. So theoretically the human body can be “programmed” into utilizing it, or processing data with it.

Haven’t computers become more appealing and more physically optimized than they were earlier? The thought of ugly machine-like cyborgs is in sharp contrast to the human body itself. Programming will gradually become so sophisticated that maintaining records of people will be a very easy task for the government. An already-programmed pregnant mother will deliver a biologically pre-programmed baby whose birth details will be automatically recorded into the government’s database upon being born; through the worldwide network of human beings.

This does not mean that there will not be any physical implants at all. Implants can help one withstand extreme temperatures, for instance. After all, no matter how powerful laptops become, we can never get rid of desktops. Neither can desktops replace huge supercomputers. Each has its own applications. So in the future, cyborgs will never replace computers. But the point here is that in the cyborg-inhabited future, one will not need any physical implants just to be able to communicate or identify oneself or to compute numbers like a calculator. Simple biological programming would be sufficient. There will be alternative advancements to avoid physical implants. So no physical cellular device would be required.

Strange and unbelievable as it may seem, the ultimate future of mobile phones is indeed that they will not exist in the long-term future.