Language skills Extras Explore 12 Thinking about the future 163 Ian has made predictions about these things. Get together in groups of six. Choose three inventions and talk about how they might work. 1 active contact lenses 3 digital jewellery 5 automatic transport systems 2 active skin 4 solar power stations 6 external brains Read the article to check your ideas. Have any of his predictions become true since he made them in 2008? 3 a b Predictions for an inventive future Active contact lenses In 1991, I predicted the invention of an active contact lens, which would use tiny lasers to project a picture onto your retina, allowing you to include any image in your normal vision. A company in the US has already made a prototype with four pixels, but in the future, we’ll see high-definition lenses with full 3D virtual reality for games-playing and so on. Active skin It will be possible to print electronic circuits straight onto the skin. They’ll only last a few days, which could be perfect for security passes or ultra-secure fingerprint technology. I’d be surprised if a prototype isn’t available in about five years. If we combine active skin and contact lens displays with the incredible miniaturisation of IT, you won’t need a keyboard or a mobile phone because you could just touch your skin to access the internet or call up a friend, and see everything in your active contact lens! Digital jewellery I predict that mobile phones will become obsolete by 2020. Voice recognition will be so advanced that a simple piece of digital jewellery will be able to connect and dial as soon as you say the word. There’s also the possibility that ‘thought recognition’ could allow you to just think the number. This is already in its early stages: the technology exists that allows you to move a screen cursor simply by having electrodes hooked up to your brain. Solar power stations The amount of sunlight falling onto the Sahara is a couple of kilowatts per square metre. If you can make solar panels that are 30% or 40% efficient – something which will be available in the very near future – and you cover just 10% of the Sahara, you’d easily solve the world’s energy needs. To make that possible, we’d need superconducting cables to get the electricity to the rest of Africa and the world, but once that technology’s there, I can see the Sahara turning into a vast solar power station. Automatic transport systems By 2020, self-driving vehicles could be quite common. Further into the future, we could very well have a country-wide transport system of small electric cars that would use electrified railways. You could tell a car where you want to go and lie back as it drives to the station, gets on the rails, drives quickly just inches from the cars in front, then gets off at the other end and drives you to your destination. External brains By 2050, I can see us having probes that pick up signals from all over the brain. We’ll then be able to use thought recognition and create computerised brain models in which you could run ultra-fast thought processes before feeding them back into the brain, massively increasing IQ. After the invention of a few key technologies, the next step could be uploading a brain onto a computer, then programming it into an android. Read again. According to Ian, are these statements (1–6) true (T) or false (F)? Write down the first four words of the sentence that supports your decision. Statements True False First four words 1 A simple kind of active contact lens exists already 2 We’ll have permanent electronic ‘tattoos’ for identity purposes. 3 We might be able to phone someone just by thinking their number. 4 Cars could be running on electric railways by 2020. 5 One day robots may be able to think in the same way as people. 4 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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