Sixth sense or how technology will transform us

A few days ago I was in the car with someone and I saw the sky and that person said, I think it's about to rain, I put out my iPod and I checked and I responded, "My sixth sense says no." To consult weather forecasts through computer, cell phone, or other mobile device is something very common, gives us some power to plan our day, our clothes and our activities. The power to predict from the palm of our hand how climate will be is part of our age's "sixth digital sense." Not only can we know about the climate, we can get to know at once news that's happening across the world, before they're even televised. Social networks have become an important player for information distribution, for example news. Many people around the world have been aware about how to support Haiti with its recent misfortune through social networks, have been organized through Twitter or have published how to make donations on blogs and websites. That's all occurring inside a small screen that's at the palm of our hand while we're travelling by train, bus, we're attending a work board or we're inside a classroom. Technology has given us "sixth sense." Thanks to different mobile phone applications you can go to a tent, photo an article's bar code and get online to a database where we can compare prices and availability at different stores.

With an increased reality we can move through the streets of a town we don't know and feel at home and have access to information about locations of interest. The GPS devices of our cars or phones guide us by routes we don't know and allow us to move through streets perhaps never visited before as if we had "s_x_or _e_t_d_”

Okay, we know all about this, the question is where will this sixth sense lead us and the answer I'll give them next: Technology will transform us. If we have been comparing society and culture from 1980 and 2030 in 20 years, it will appear that we are talking about two different planets. The technological changes are increasingly radical and accelerating but in 50 years only technologies have been evolving but human beings have been evolving. That's right, we are at the demand of our species's next great evolution, not necessarily an evolution caused by nature but by technology. Since this topic is as good as to write a book I will leave you with three thoughts so that you will put together the rest of the puzzle:

1. MIT University in the U.S. has been working for a long time on a device that makes use of the technologies mentioned above but in a very special way. It's basically an internet-connected medallion with a camera and a projector. The camera can detect gestures with his hands and his projector projects images on any surface, for example his palm, his arm or his wall. They're sure already understanding the idea, it's a small computer that instead of getting information with a keyboard gets it through the camera, to run commands they get gestures with their hands and to get back information rather than using a screen using the projector. Some of them have shown their skills to scan bar code and search best prices at other stores, take photographs, project a wrist strap watch, read news about a wall, take note about a book or make phone calls literally from the palm of our hand.

2. The increased reality can now be put into a pair of pupils, scientists have developed a kind of tiny lens that is put into the pupil as any other and charged automatically with eye movements, this lens can be sent remote images. The only thing she's projecting for now is a digit as she's still under development, and the idea is that after that, she's not just using it to project a digit but with whole text, images and all sorts of information that will bring an increased reality to our vision without the need for an outside device, but just pounding.

3. Nanotechnology is intended as one of the technologies that will be most important in the future. Currently, as a result of this, there are robots with a cell size that will be able to assist doctors in monitoring bleeding, examining patients and even curing infections and viral diseases. That science fiction from the film "The Fantastic Journey" in which they cut a ship with scientists inside and inject it into a person today is a different reality. In the future we will have nanorobots within our body that will perhaps make us stronger and more intelligent, we will have merged somehow with technologies.

That all leads me to two conclusions: Technology will transform us and... in the future it will be very difficult to prevent students from cheating at exams.