COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Network-Based Telepathy
Dave Evans has. The former chief futurist at Cisco, Evans stated in a 2011 interview that “we will
create Internet-based telepathy,” and predicted that both hardware and software would soon be
integrated into “wetware”—the human body.
Not as far as you might think. In a fascinating (or horrifying, depending on how you feel about this
sort of thing) experiment, Dr. Rajesh Rao and members of his lab at the University of Washington
have created a rudimentary “telepathic” system that connects the brains of two people.

Holograms
One of the leaders in this field is a company called Holoxica, which is currently working on
advanced holography for use in engineering, science, and medical imaging.
In a recent TED talk, founder Javid Kahn discussed the progression of holographic technology from
simple objects, like a digital clock, to more complex ones, like a multi-layered human anatomical
model.
AI-Assisted Communication
Eventually, all communication could be run through two filters of AI, creating very economical and
efficient communications. A number of app developers are already working toward a system like
this, including the crew behind Mailstrom. Although Mailstrom doesn’t use an AI algorithm, it aims
to learn a lot about your e-mail behavior and allow you to take advantage of what it learns.
For example, if you receive a number of e-mails from different people that are all about the same
thing, you could use Mailstrom to respond to all of them with a single e-mail, even though they’re
from different e-mail threads. And, of course, it also helps you delete a huge number of e-mails at
the same time, getting you one step closer to the elusive inbox zero.
The world is getting closer to effective AI-assisted communication every day, and it won’t be
surprising if the way you communicate looks a lot different 5 year from now.

Instantaneous Translation
DARPA is working on a system called Broad Operational Language Translation, or BOLT, a
system that will someday instantaneously translate foreign languages into English.

Outside of the highly secretive DARPA, there are companies working on similar translation
systems, such as the Compadre system by SpeechGear. There are a number of components in
Compadre, but the most interesting one, Interact, is a great example of the potential of instant
translation. To use Interact, you just say the words you want translated—your device translates the
words into another language and speaks them aloud.