Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hi brain Stuff. I'm more in vogel Bomb and this is another classic episode from the brain Stuff archives. We first aired this one back in which feels like a million years ago, but wasn't really that ancient. Nonetheless, some of the predictions it made are already outdated. But I still think the question that this episode poses is an interesting one. What technology is going to replace the smartphone? Hi brain Stuff,
Lauren vogel Bomb. Here. Today, nearly eight in ten Americans own a smartphone, and we've become accustomed to using them for everything from listening to podcasts, taking pictures, reading news, and posting on social media, to shopping and making financial transactions. For many people, smartphones have even taken the place of once common everyday implements like tape measures, flashlights, maps, and
wrist watches. Smartphones have transformed everyday life so much that it's easy to forget that they only became popular a little bit more than ten years ago. That's when Apple released the iPhone, which combined mobile internet access and computing power with a multi touch screen interface, making it possible to do pretty much everything by tapping and flipping with
one fingertip or two. A recent survey found that smartphone users now spend about five hours a day using their devices, which is why it's tough to walk down a crowded sidewalk in any major city without bumping into someone fixated upon hit or her screen. But with technological process moving at broadband speed these days, we have to think that the smartphone as we know it has a limited life expectancy.
Survey of smartphone users across the world by Ericsson, the Swedish communications technology and services company, found that one in two people expected that the smartphone would become obsolete by which leads to the big question, what's going to replace the smartphone? Prognosticators predict that advances in technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and wearable electronics will spawn a new generation devices that could change our everyday
existence even more than the smartphone did. We spoke with Jack Aldrich, a futurist who helps business people figure out how to understand and benefit from emerging trends. They said, the transition we're about to experience is that we're going to go from accessing the internet to living in the internet.
We don't have a suitably zeitgeisty name for those gadgets, but it's a pretty safe bet that they won't be palm sized rectangles with glass screens, or with any screen at all, for that matter, and they may not even
be a single gadget. Brad Barons, the chief strategy officer for the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, predicts that the smartphone will give way to personal area networks, clusters of tiny gadgets concealed in beads, in a necklace, or built into eyeglasses or contact lenses. Such devices will use VR and a R to project information into our field of vision, eliminating the need for
a screen. And just as we control apps on today's smartphones by moving our fingers, will be able to manipulate our next generation personal area net works through voice commands or by gesturing in the air, perhaps with the help of haptic technology like that buzz when you get a text, to help sipulate the sensory feedback of touching actual objects. Typing may not ever become a completely extinct skill, but it may someday become as rare as someone who writes
an elegant Longhand with calligraphy pens. But increasingly we won't have to input as much information as we once did. That's because next gen intelligent assistance, imagine a vastly more intuitive version of Siri, Alex or Kirtana, will learn to figure out what we want to know or do, sometimes before we realize it ourselves. Aldrich predicts that in the near future, our personal gadgetry will study our eye movements
in order to make predictions. Staring at something for two seconds, say, might prompt it to give us more information about that thing. Barrens and visions that the intelligent assistance of the future will continually whisper in our ears and project messages that only we can see that might help us in a lot of ways. If we encounter a person and can't recall their name, for example, doctor John Smith might flash
before our eyes to remind us. It's also conceivable that our future devices and intelligent assistance may interact with other people's digital assistance, possibly taking the place of some of our interaction with actual people. That's a prospect that Baron's finds both interesting and disturbing. He points to current trends like texting instead of calling or using apps like Tinder to avoid having to walk up to that cute person
in the bar with no introduction. Baron said, some of this is good, but it also means that people can increasingly live in their own little worlds inside what author Eli Pariser has dubbed filter bubbles, where you don't need to recognize that there are other points of view about things. But next generation personal communication devices may also change us in other ways that we haven't yet envisioned, as with the smartphone, we'll have to start using them to find out.
Today's upisode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced by Tristo McNeil and Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other tech topics, visit house toff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio or more podcasts My heart Radio visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H