Many times I’ve driven past a store wondering if they have a certain item or what their store hours are. While I understand that it’s relatively easy to “Ask Siri” or “Hey Google,” I would much rather have the ability to just aim my phone at the store, hit a button, and automatically call them.

Or how about this? How often have you wished you could text a message to the people in the car next to you on the freeway (point-n-warn)? Or at some person across the room from you at a party (point-n-flirt)?

Not to be confused with “point-n-click,” which is designed for computer mouse engagement for people with disabilities, this point-n-call/text function would be built into a phone, like a camera function. In fact, in some of the ways we’d use it, it may need to activate the camera function.

Point-n-call/text would enable you to engage, through your smartphone or other device, with the technology of other devices that you are not otherwise connected to.

When you’re pointing at a building, there would need to be a “receptor” capability in or around that building to allow or engage in the interaction. The way I see it, point-n-call/text could be triggered by image recognition and/or Internet-based connectivity. In fact, it would be another iteration of the Internet of Things (IoT), with more devices talking to more things.

Naturally you’d need some system of checks and balances because, for example, you wouldn’t want someone to point-n-disengage your security system or turn the receptor mechanism on and off. Many of these capabilities will have to be decided on by the product designers, lawyers, and ethicists as they explore the feasibility and advisability of these and thousands of other use cases waiting to see the light of day.

But rather than getting buried in the hypothetical weeds of functionality, I’d rather spend time thinking through the “what if” side of the equation and the new world of interactivity it would open up.

That said, I do need to address the elephant in the room: the obvious potential for abuse, harassment, and privacy intrusions stemming from point-n-call/text. I would just say, though, that nearly every communication technology opens those doors. Spam calls interrupt my day constantly. Texts with malicious links hit my smartphone 24/7. Social media sites are breeding grounds for slander and the spread of misinformation. But in these and other cases, including, I would argue, a point-n-call/text function, the bad must be weighed against the good … and I see far more positive aspects to this presumptive technology.

An interactive point-n-call/text function will add additional lines of communication and save time. It will help us make better-informed decisions and stimulate interpersonal conversations and relationships.

Going through a museum, wouldn’t it be great to point-n-text at a piece of artwork to find out about the artist or the artwork itself?

Driving past a city, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to point-n-call a highway sign and find out what businesses are located there, the history of the area, and if there are any hotel rooms available?

At a cocktail party, wouldn’t you want someone to surreptitiously point-n-warn you that you have chip dip on your chin? Yes, we need an app for that!

What if you could point at a billboard, sign on a bus, or ad on the back of a pedicab and get more detail, find pricing, or ask questions?

Here are a few more intriguing use cases for point-n-call/text technology:

• Point at an actor on stage or screen and find out what other shows they’ve been in.
• Point at a house and get a satellite image of it.
• Point at a sporting venue and find out the cost of admission for today’s event.
• Point at a landmark and begin an AI conversation about its significance.
• Point at a dental office to find the price of an implant or a root canal.
• Point at a business and see their reputation score.

Admittedly, my description is simplistic, and I’m only scratching the surface with these possible use cases. But in the interest of advancing humanity’s ability to productively communicate, I’m hoping to stimulate the thinking of the right person. If I’m successful, I’ll have a private moment of pride and satisfaction when I see this feature on my iPhone 15!

As we discuss this type of scenario, they begin as a series of attacks on critical infrastructure, with one country being severely undermined by state-sponsored terrorists, or a rogue band of hackers. Malicious computer code inserted into a critical system related to transportation, finance, health, or utilities, for example, can bring a nation to its knees, or even turn these systems into weapons – crashing planes, blowing up nuclear plants, releasing contagions … no doubt you’ve seen the same movies I have.

Now let’s imagine another kind of cyber war – an extension of the propaganda wars of the past. Not Hanoi Hanna or Tokyo Rose, but lies and misinformation spread on mainstream social media sites, maybe even seemingly by famous people. This isn’t farfetched, of course, and it’s happened already, usually on a smaller scale. We’ve all seen these messages – “Ignore that post, I’ve been hacked.” Or, “Don’t respond to a friend request from me, my account has been hacked.”

Add to this plot our mainstream media’s proclivity to use social media as a news source, and our disinformation pipeline can be amplified a hundred-fold before it’s proven false or bogus. Once it’s out there, like the evil genie, it becomes impossible to put back into the bottle.

As we’re seeing these days, people eagerly accept, believe, and share any “news item” they see that supports their viewpoint. It doesn’t take much to polarize a nation when people stop learning and choose just to “accept.”

This opens the door for foreign agents to sow discord, polarization, division, and humiliation through social media. But who needs a foreign agent to do that these days!

Let’s take things a step further. What if the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account of a world leader, a nation’s president for the sake of argument, is hacked? In the ten minutes before the account can be locked down, slanderous or even extremely dangerous information is presented as fact. “Prime Minister X is a predator.” “We’re sending troops to the Y country border for an imminent invasion.” “We will seek to assassinate the evil leader of country Z.” Can you imagine the international reaction and the national security/military Code Reds that would be triggered?

Is it possible that our next war could be triggered by fake news on Facebook? Keep in mind, virtually every past war has resulted from a massive communications problem, and in our world today, a little misinformation can go a long way since 1.62 billion users visit Facebook daily and most of them like to share.

Little by little, Facebook is being dominated by toxic advocates. If you unfriend the polarizing people, then you’re not left with much. If we add enough filters to manage our feed, we might get the message, “Sorry, I can’t find anything else you might want to see!”

Final Thoughts

In my mind, the biggest danger Facebook and similar sites pose is not the pre-emptive nuclear war resulting from a hacked presidential post, but how they’re dividing us and polarizing society.

Yes, virtually every technology, even those created with the best of intentions, can be used to the detriment of society. And now we can add Facebook and Twitter to that list.

Social media, as it is being pressured by its boycotting advertisers, has found itself being pushed towards an impossibly high standard.

Facebook and Twitter now have the mandate to become their own arbitrators of not only what’s true and what’s not, but also what’s demeaning, inflammatory, bullying, and mean-spirited. And they’re attempting to do so in a way that’s okay with every country, culture, religion, ethnic group, and language. In short, it’s simply not possible.

My prediction is that once we’ve seen that they’ve passed their peak, perhaps only a few months away, social media will get replaced with what comes next, something edgier and more disturbing, but a platform that insulates and removes itself from our most egregious human behavior.

Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities attract bright minds.

In the future, communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.

They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.

The city of the future will form around multiple dimensions of human connectedness, the interfaces created between people and their surrounding community. A well-connected community will be a vibrant community where ideas are exchanged, energies are exchanged, and people become extremely loyal to the networks that connect them to the rest of the world.

While it is now easy to communicate with people all over the world, we can only physically interact with people and places locally.

For this reason, I’d like to step you through seven new developments that will add to our overall connectedness. So in addition to things like shopping malls, schools, hospitals, parks, concert venues, theaters, recreation areas, museums, and libraries that define our cities today, we are on the edge of raising the bar for how we define the nature of community.

Holographic overlays will help simplify the gameplay for the audiences.

1. E-Sports Arenas

Recently, Philadelphia announced plans for a 65,000-square-foot Fusion Arena, an electronic gaming arena that will host home games for the Philadelphia Fusion. They are a professional nine-person team in the newly formed 20-team Overwatch League.

This announcement followed similar press releases for Santa Ana, CA; Arlington, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Seoul, Korea; Burbank, CA; and Honolulu, HI.

It’s estimated that the eSports audience will grow to nearly 600 million gamers in 2020 with revenues exceeding $1.3 billion

Look for hundreds of this type of eSports arena to pop up over the next decade beginning in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Once tournaments get more established, I would expect much larger stadium size venues to appear, with some seating football and soccer-size crowds of 80K-100K.

Mini airports will soon become a common feature in most cities.

2. Mini Airports

When flying drones started entering our consciousness a few years ago, a number of drone pioneers focused their attention on vehicles big enough to transport people.

Today, following the maiden voyage of the first Volocopter flight in Dubai, September of 2017, several companies have announced their intentions to compete in the soon-to-emerge drone taxi industry.

No one disagrees with the vast number of problems that will need to be solved before it becomes a staple of our transportation mix; yet, the overwhelming allure of this prospect has attracted a growing number of our best and brightest seeking to make a name for themselves in an industry where the sky is literally the limit.

In just a few years air taxis will be common in most major cities and along with them will come a new kind of infrastructure – mini airports.

During the first stage of development, planners and entrepreneurs will carve out a number of helipads in addition to ground-based landing pads around cities. These will most likely be small sections of existing parking lots.

As traffic grows, and the number of landing and departures grows from tens to hundreds a day, single landing pads will grow into multiple pads with waiting areas.

Over time, crude landing areas will evolve into sophisticated terminals for managing passengers as well as the street-level and air traffic surrounding each of these mini airports.

The speed of this evolution will largely depend on pricing. With private planes still costing many times the cost of a first class ticket, that option has never made its way into mainstream consciousness. If flying drones can somehow lower the cost to 2-3 times an Uber drive across town, it will grow quickly.

The character of a community will be defined by the unique tournaments it hosts

3. Tournament Centers

Somewhere in between convention centers, rec centers, and sporting arenas is new type of facility designed around competitions.

Most cities host a number of tournaments each year ranging from athletic competitions like softball and basketball tournaments to more intellectual endeavors such as chess club tournaments, spelling bees, or debate forums.

The complete range of contests that take place within a city each year can be truly impressive, and the overall economic impact of these ventures has not been overlooked. From an economic standpoint, some cultural events can make or break a city budget.

But more than the underlying economics of tournaments are the fluid social environments that are evolving around us. With populations becoming more transient, people want to be able to “plug in” wherever they happen to be and this need will begin to coalesce around a “place” specifically designed for tournaments.

In much the same way large conventions and group meetings have been formalized with the construction of convention centers, and recreational activities coalescing around rec centers, a new breed of facilities designed around contests and competitions will emerge – tournament centers.

Tournament Centers will be developed using various configurations to draw attention to the city and its cultural identity. A city along a river may include facilities for managing fishing competitions, while a city in the mountains may have provisions for mountain climbing competitions.

Yet, most of the physical structures will be designed around easily configurable open spaces, and a resident team of tournament designers who will earn their stripes by organizing a complete year around assortment of competitions.

Tournaments will range from volleyball to badminton, from bridge to poker, from hot air balloons to marathons, and from scrabble to robotics. The variety of options will only be limited by a community’s imagination.

Since each contest will have its own group of loyalists, fan clubs, and organizational dynamics, each event will involve a communication structure that ties directly into the group’s core user community.

From an entertainment standpoint, it will be easy to find out about all of the upcoming tournaments taking place. For visitors, it will be an easy entry point to become familiar with a local culture.

How easy is it for you to sponsor a memorial for a loved one in your city?

4. Memorial Gardens

Great cities in history were known for their grand parks with their flowing masterpieces of floral design. But today’s parks are often little more than freshly cut grass and trimmed trees, with a playground thrown into one corner for the kids.

For most cities, parks have deteriorated into rubber stamped open space, boiled down to the bare essentials of grass, trees, sidewalks, playgrounds, and benches – nothing memorable, with little to inspire the mind.

With a growing resentment towards sameness, and a move towards personalization and hyper-individuality, perhaps a better approach is the idea of memorial gardens where the community decides on a particular theme and becomes integrally involved in creating its own distinctive features.

Adding to the possibilities is a way for people to leave memorials for their loved ones. Rather than spending money on a tombstone in a cemetery that few people ever see, the money could be better spent on a statue, fountain, park bench, bridge, fountain, sculpture, or fire pit with a memorial plaque.

Since a growing number of people are choosing cremation over caskets, they are still looking for a “place” to visit their loved ones. By adding a stylish memorial plaque, every new feature would be paid for by the sponsoring entity or individuals.

Memorial gardens will range from active to passive on the community involvement scale, but with each new development, the host city will set into motion a long-range plan for people to rally around.

With their numbers exploding, new types of coworking will emerge for freelance project teams

5. Freelancer Colonies

As a next-generation type of coworking facility, freelancer colonies are an evolving organizational structure designed around matching talent with pending work projects. With a growing number of “gig workers” looking for their next project, freelancer colonies become a “place” where new projects are continually percolating.

Each freelancer colony will be formed around one or more project managers, and a staff that is focused on landing new projects. As new projects take shape, managers will reach out to their trusted networks of free agents to tackle the critical components of each undertaking.

Colonies will develop their own standard operating procedures with consistent agreements, payment processes, legal structures, management software, and methods for resolving disputes. Over time they will be rated on their ability to complete tasks with specific ratings on efficiency, quality of work, and how well they treat the talent.

The driving forces behind freelancer colonies are more than the fact that it is a good idea. Rather, it is being driven by a combination of technology, emerging culture, and governmental systems that make it the logical next step in the evolution of work.

Most will be organized around a topical area best suited for the talent base of their core team. As an example, a team of photonics engineers will attract projects best suited for that kind of talent. Likewise, a working group of programmers specializing in computer gaming applications will serve as a magnet for new gaming projects.

In some instances, large corporations will launch their own freelancer colonies as a way to expand capability without adding to their headcount. Staffed with a few project managers, the company will use the colony as a proving ground for experimental assignments best performed outside of the cultural bounds of existing workflow.

Companies are always looking for ways to circumvent the escalating costs of adding staff, and project-based work done in freelancer colonies becomes a logical option.

With mobile retail, every day brings a new set of vendors and a new experience.

6. Driverless Mobile Mall Shops

The idea of mobile mall shops started when I was thinking about rural communities. In most small towns the customer base is too low to warrant a full-time presence and permanent storefront. But a one-day-a-week traveling shop in five or six communities might be a perfect arrangement.

For this reason, it’s not a stretch to envision a new form of shopping center that caters to mobile businesses. With a stationary common area at its core, the mobile mall will be a central gathering place where a variety of businesses can “doc,” “plug-in,” and set up shop.

RVs, trucks, vans, and other large vehicles can be converted into traveling dental offices, tax preparation centers, chiropractic clinics, and retail storefronts. As they pull into place, merchandise and service areas will expand into a common area creating an “open bazaar” feel for the shoppers.

Most of the traveling storefronts will be one or two person businesses, nomadically traveling from city to city on their daily business adventure. Others will work a regular circuit, showing up on the same day each week, building a loyal customer base.

When your shopping experience is defined around fine craftsmanship.

7. Maker Districts

With so many retail stores closing, consumers are left with fewer options for out-of-the-home forms of entertainment as well as a pent-up demand for meaningful experiences. This collision course of trends is creating the perfect storm for a new kind of retail experience – Maker Districts.

Walking through an active, vibrant shopping district where people are baking bread, spinning pottery, brewing beer, making jewelry, cutting and designing stained glass, decorating cakes, molding with pewter, and sculpting with clay, will give every visitor their own one-of-a-kind experience.

In addition to the sights and smells, having musicians performing mood-stirring music will help form a different ambiance, character, and vibe with every visit.

In this environment, creative people are both the entertainment and the proprietors of the shops.

A maker district can best be described as a cross between an artist colony, farmers market, woodworking shop, music festival, bakery, brewpub, and brainstorming session all happening in the same space. It’s all that and more.

Here’s why I see Maker Districts entering your lives in a big way.

With online storefronts flourishing, the need to run down to the local store and pick something up has been replaced with a few clicks of the mouse and a delivery guy knocking on your door a couple hours later.

But consumers are getting restless. As mind numbing as it might have been to run to the store and pick up a bag of flour, there was always the chance of running into someone unexpectedly.

Coffee shops have largely replaced retail stores as the next best place to hang out. Most are busy, noisy places, but fresh coffee is constantly being brewed and people love to feel like they’re part of the maker experience.

The maker experience comes in many different forms, most of which are on the opposite end of the spectrum from coffee.

There are several reasons why Maker Districts are on the verge of turning traditional retail on it’s head.

First, people love to watch things being made. Every source of creation is also the source of inspiration.

Second, small mom and pop businesses have a vested interest in building their community. No, they probably aren’t the most sophisticated, tech savvy business people, but artisan products don’t need to compete on price, and they only need to earn enough for a comfortable lifestyle. These are people that are doing what they love, not changing the world.

Finally, from a real estate standpoint, the time it takes to refill an empty big box store with a Maker District can be a fraction of the time it takes to bring in another large-scale retailer. Cities will love having sales tax revenues replaced quickly and neighbors will love being part of the new experience.

Final Thoughts

The role of the city is changing. While most cities are focused on being “smarter,” “greener,” better connected, and having the most iconic architecture, few are paying attention to “what’s missing.”

Each new dimension of community connectedness is adding to the overall human experience.

Even though much of today’s technology is giving us super-human abilities and virtually everyone can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before, every new technology requires skills, talents, and understandings that are hard to quantify.

A fully engaged community, with participatory openings, endless networking occasions, and entirely new paths for moving dreams to reality will open the doors to new opportunities that have yet to be imagined.

The people of the world have an “unfinishable mandate” to continually stretch, grow, propagate, and master not only the world around us, but also the entire universe. And it all begins with rethinking our cities.

Once again, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is an AI generated random human face!

If you recently lost your job, I encourage you to blame this young lady. Contrary to first impressions, this isn’t a real person at all. She is nothing more than an AI generated random human face.

In the past we’ve run into fake products, fake identities, fake profiles, and fake news. But now we may end up with the biggest problem of them all – fake people.

On the surface, she’s a curiosity. She seems oddly familiar, the girl next door, the one that got away, or a friend of a friend. But she is indeed a fake person.

In fact, it would be easy to use AI to generate 100 similarly striking photos of men and women across the cultural, age, and race spectrum, and quickly A-B test to see which one works best for selling cars to older Asian couples in Sarasota, Florida. Or selling refrigerators to middle aged women in Des Moines, Iowa. Or selling skateboards to Hispanic teenagers in Pocatello, Idaho. Or selling starter homes in Pueblo, Colorado to working millennials.

Fake child photo.

When it comes to fake photos, we’re just getting started.

Why would I hire a supermodel if I can randomly generate someone new? Why would I buy a stock photo when I can auto-generate one?

Any scene, with or without people, the same AI that generates fake people can auto-generate fake houses, fake cities, fake situations, fake pets, fake disputes, fake arguments, fake injuries, and fake police responding to whatever fake stuff supposedly happened.

Not only can AI create realistic videos of people doing and saying things they’d never say or do in real life, it can add convincing human faces that never existed in the first place. We are about to become deluged with tons of fake testimonials hoping to persuade us to buy some new product or service.

In 2014 the first computer was created to use a form of machine learning called Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN. It worked like a morphing program that blended inputs from several sources, in this case human faces.

Artificial neural networks are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks to mimic the activity of neurons in the human brain. In a GAN, two neural networks are essentially pitted against each other. One of the networks functions as a generative algorithm, while the other challenges the results of the first, thereby playing an adversarial role, hence the name.

To demonstrate this, thispersondoesnotexist.com is a website that auto-generates the face of a new fake person every time the page is refreshed.

As you can imagine, it won’t be long before this technology starts to permeate many other industries.

The porn industry is already rethinking its business models because every existing video can be stolen and re-mastered with new faces. These fake porn videos have taken on the moniker of “deepfakes” and are already showing up online.

Every court case, news story, historical document, and eyewitness account will suddenly need to be held to sophisticated levels of scrutiny. Our understanding of what constitutes “truth” is about to get rocked to its very core.

This is not a real photo, but a photo-realistic 3D rendering.

Photo-Realistic 3D Renderings

The same software that was used to help window manufacturers demonstrate what their products looked like in changing sunlight has evolved into a fascinating new field of photo-realistic 3D rendering.

What you see above is yet another step in the evolution of graphic imaging, allowing visionary thinkers to illustrate scenes and environments that don’t exist.

As we make further advancements in AR/VR and begin to immerse ourselves into fantasy game settings, some very talented people will be challenging our very notion of what constitutes “real.”

This type of technology is clearly setting the stage for a massive new industry designed around the limitless opportunities of “worlds not yet invented.” The gaming industry is already pushing the envelope in this area but is just scratching the surface of what’s truly possible.

Where are the “fake people” opportunities?

Technology itself is neither good nor bad, but naturally the way people use it can be detrimental to one group or another.

Whenever there is a problem, I‘m quick to look for the opportunity side of the equation. So what new businesses or micro-industries will this create?

As an example, how long will it be before someone will be able to create an entire feature-length action video without cameras, actors, or actresses? One person sitting at a computer could suddenly compete directly with Hollywood studios. Instead of spending $100-200 million on producing a big-budget movie, the hard costs for this kind of film could be close to zero.

In this scenario, the fine art of storytelling becomes radically faster, easier, and cheaper. Naturally this could lead to more businesses creating more movies, VR experiences, and next-gen performances for far less money.

The face of Nicolaus Copernicus reconstructed by a Polish forensic team.

Rewriting History

Born in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was one of the brightest minds among Renaissance-era mathematicians and astronomers. He formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe. He died at the age of 70.

For the past 500 years, the image on the right was the only image we had to know what he looked like. Recently, a Polish forensic team spent time reconstructing this face from his skeletal remains.

It won’t be long before we have new ways of automating that process.

How long before we have the ability to create photos and videos of our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors? How long before we have video ads of people like Einstein, Lincoln, Gandhi, or Mandela selling soft drinks, home appliances, beer, of trying to convince us to vote for or against the latest ballot issue?

A number of AIs are now using deep learning techniques to produce human-sounding speech. Google’s DeepMind uses WaveNet, which can copy and reproduce human speech almost perfectly. Similarly, the startup Lyrebird has an algorithm that is able to synthesize a human’s voice by recording one minute of audio.

Last year when Google CEO Sundar Pichai first demonstrated their Duplex product, capable of making some very human sounding phone calls, complete with personal quirks and inflections, a number of people objected to the ethics of a fake human voice impersonating a real human.

Google subsequently promised they would add a warning or disclosure in calls originating from this technology, but they are also working to make additional improvements.

Adding to the growing pallet of tools for imitating humans are AI-infused robots that can vividly express human emotion like Hanson Robotics’ Sophia and SoftBank’s Pepper.

All of the above are images of fake people that never existed.

Final Thoughts

It’s official; we have passed the famed Turing Test in areas of voice, image, and video. They are now indistinguishable from the real thing.

Clearly, an age of smarter machines is already here, and as the ability for AI to perform tasks previously only human beings could do improves, the line between human and machine will continue to blur. Now, the only question is if it will eventually disappear altogether.

To answer my original question, yes, we do indeed have a fake people problem, and we have yet figured out what measures need to be taken to protect us from scam artists.

Our biggest danger, as always, is devious people. My guess is that a number of cons are already in play and we won’t hear about them until several people have lost their entire life savings.

Even more perplexing will be those who are operating in the grey areas of the law, using just enough fakeness to operate inside the layers of fuzziness and stay somewhat legal.

So how does this problem get solved, and who is ultimately responsible for managing the problems as they occur?

I’d love to hear your thoughts so feel free to weigh in if you have a story, an answer, or a solution.
opinions on this topic.

Throughout history people have been burdened by all the things they’ve had to carry with them, typically in their pockets, wallets, or purses.

In the past, leaving the house was a checklist exercise for remembering all the things to take along, and yes, most of us had our pockets and purses filled with just-in-case stuff. But the true burden was complying with the increasing demands of business and government. We lived in constant fear of losing out for not having the right items in the right place at the right time.

Fifty years ago, every train, ship, and airline required a paper ticket. Every concert, movie theater, and Broadway show required the same type of paper tickets.

If a cop pulled us over we needed a drivers license, proof of insurance, car registration, and perhaps a few random things that the police officer felt necessary to take a look at.

Most guys carried a pliers, pocketknife, and keys. The plier was to fix things. The pocketknife was for security, but became much more of a tool than a source of protection. Keys were for opening doors or anything with a lock on it.

Various types of wallets and purses became the natural storage place for everything important like IDs, money, credit cards, makeup, and kids photos.

More recently, the most important item of all has become our smartphones.

Our phones have replaced the need for most of these items, but very few of us have taken it to the logical extreme of replacing all of our other items.

Which items will disappear next?

Which item do you carry that you’re anxious to get rid of?

Most of us have some combination of cash, keys, and wallet/purse near us at all times. I don’t see the purse going away anytime soon because it serves more as a fashion accessory than a useful tool, but wallets are not nearly as indispensable as they once were.

Phones are replacing cash, but not in all situations. Putting money in collection plates, gifts to charities, street performers, or homeless people are all challenging situations that don’t have obvious solutions, yet.

That said, China has been leading the world with its effort to eliminate cash, instead using Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay. In major cities, tip jars, donation plates, and gratuity hats used to collect money for street buskers have been replaced with easy-to-use QR codes where simply aiming a phone and clicking a button will remit payment.

When it comes to keys, we’re seeing key fobs and digital keypads replace many of the traditional key locks on our homes, offices, and cars. In fact, it’s hard to come up with a compelling reason why any of us should still be using keys 10 years from now.

The locksmith industry has been quick to adapt to the ever-changing demands of the marketplace, yet there has been no overarching urgency for businesses to make the change.

Our need to lock and secure cars, doors, houses, and offices is not going away, but the way we lock something, either by waving a hand, biometric scan, or voice command, is transitioning to interactive systems that don’t require keys.

Going from Physical to Digital IDs

One of the mainstays of our wallet or purse has always been some form of required identification. This often takes the form of a driver’s license, passport, or ID card.

However, we are quickly moving past the era of showing some form of physical proof of who we are. With rapidly improving biometrics, voice recognition, and even body movement analyzers, the need to produce an ID is falling by the wayside.

The emerging digital identity industry is based on the belief that every individual is unique and different. As Dr. Seuss so aptly put it, “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Naturally, all of the sites that store personal biometric data will need to be accessible around the world, and permissions for country-to-country access still need to be worked out, but it’s very doable and this type of the technology is already being implemented.

We are only a few years from automating every border entry, custom station, airport TSA, and military checkpoint.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to this is the sheer number of jobs that will be eliminated. Countless millions around the world earn a living staring thoughtlessly at one ID after another, and even though it’s the epitome of meaningless work, it’s still a paycheck.

In my view, our ability to advance the human race is being needlessly throttled by mind numbing jobs like this that hold little importance.

The Invisible Smartphone

As we work our way down the list, it’s easy to see how smartphones start replacing the last few items we still carry with us. But is it possible to automate the smartphone itself out of existence?

Before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, phones had been getting smaller and several startups had introduced wearable phones in the form of jewelry, gloves, and even imbedded tattoos.

However, the iPhone added a huge number of tools and capabilities that couldn’t be duplicated in phone-only technology.

Adding cameras, videos, music, GPS, email, texting, social networking, mobile apps, and impressive amounts of storage had a way of rewriting how we interacted with these devices, and our expectations changed, again, and again, and again.

While we will invariably see the smartphone evolve in many ways, I have a hard time imagining a way to completely dematerialize the smartphone into something without any physical form.

Final Thoughts

One by one, the physical items we carry with us are beginning to disappear.

Once we say goodbye to our cash, keys, and IDs we will begin to get a taste of the true nature of technological freedom.

If we truly desire a life free of any physical encumbrances, I’d like to retell my now-infamous swarmbot scenario:

“Imagine stepping out of the shower in the morning, and rather than reaching for a towel, a swarm of ten thousand flying micro drones will surround you and begin to dry you off.

A few seconds after drying your skin, the same swarm will begin to attend to other morning prep duties such as shaving, applying makeup, drying and fixing your hair, adding lotions, deodorant, and powder where necessary, and completing everything in mere seconds.

Once the face-prep is finished, the swarm will assemble itself as your clothing, rearranging itself into the color, style, and fashion most appropriate for your mood and the day ahead.

The swarm will be in constant communication with you, anticipating your needs, responding to voice commands, replying when necessary through your-ears-only voices or your-eyes-only projections.

The swarm will handle many duties, simultaneously serving as body armor to protect you from injury, adjusting temperatures to keep you warm or cool, constantly communicating with the rest of the world-wide swarm network, attending to every bodily function, keeping you fit and trim in the process.

Downloadable swarm apps will give you as many capabilities as you desire, with brilliant new competencies added on a daily basis.

These same bots will also serve as your short-range transportation system. Much like a scene from a Superman comic book, the swarm will physically lift your body and fly you to where ever you want to go.

If this sounds like science fiction, it’s because the scenario leapfrogged 10-15 generations of swarm development. At the same time, we are quickly moving into unchartered territory, and swarmbots like this will soon have capabilities far beyond anything we can imagine.”

As with all technology, there will be unintended consequences, and people with devious minds will figure out ways to use this kind of tech for evil purposes.

Yes, on some level we will have bad swarms fighting good swarms, and swarm hackers plotting to corrupt even our most advanced technologies. But still, on balance, the forces of those with good intentions will outweigh those with criminal intent.

As always, I remain optimistic about the amazing future unfolding around us. Personally I can’t wait to have my own personal swarm, and the empty pockets that epitomize this level of advancement.