When all the good roads begin to cross -

Artificial intelligence, autonomous technologies, virtual and augmented realities oddly sound like things of the future but in reality their roots are quite old and there emergence is all around us today.

Individual achievements and breakthroughs pull us forward as a whole. Bringing the gift of voice back to someone who has been lost their own, 3-D printing limbs and homes for people who have been ravaged by war and poverty a few of the more noble examples. But there are also advances in gaming and communication that are clearing way for other uses to be realized and reclaimed. Extended realities and any new tech breakthroughs are often seen as a solution in search of a problem and that is typically correct. This is evolution and the firsts are always are pieces of a puzzle yet to be realized in moments to come.

Giving voice to the voiceless

Giving voice is a wonderful life changing or life aligning moment.VocalID can take a one minute recording of your own voice, and turn it into complete sentences with all the emotion and flux required for conversations you will be able to join again. Simultaneously in similar techAdobe Voco has created what is being called the photoshop for voice editing for video and supplementing indistinguishable from human voice assisted AI’s.

Dueling AI, learn to play off each other’s riffs

A 360 3-d avatar scan in 10 seconds

Researcher/scientist at Cornell University can 360 scan you, with your arms out and in less than a 10 second rotation they create a GrandTheft auto level of a 3d model of you with joints and pivots all rigged and ready to animate… and can be accurate on all body shapes to within 5Mm. These are major steps for the future of Virtual Reality experiences, film, and gaming.

Realtime mimic

Epic Games uses Unreal Engine to real-time motion capture a damn near photorealistic live avatar. That that mimics your emotions down to the slightest a glance

3-D printing limbs & skin

Artists like Ivan Owen, doctors, organizations and so many others are bring new capability to people of 3rd world and developing countries who for medical inequalities, war ravaged lives or countless other reasons have lost limbs, jaws, even skin, These are becoming replenished at dwindling low costs by collective resources like enablingthefuture.org/

The potential of each of these in its own right is merely stunning and life changing for those with disrupted lives… but in combination these become staggering. The larger puzzle can begin to come to mind.

When all the good roads begin to cross

These roads we are heading towards are especially top of mind for me as I am writing this mid-season 2 of HBO’s WestWorld, for those unfamiliar it’s story is essentially that there is a theme park in the near future where people can visit other moments in time and world history, interacting primarily with ai hosts that are encroaching on undetectable…the show is tweaking its audience’s perspective and understanding of just what it means to be human when all of our behaviors, patterns, and motivations are proving to be not only predictable but prescribable. A season and a half in to this sci-fi treasure and it has many questioning whether we ourselves truly have free will at all. Culturally these questions are coming forward in other experiences too like Black Mirror which is in truth revealing a bit of a societal loop too, the same fears of the unknown and the unexpected consequences of the late 1950’s and 60’s brought us TwilightZone when people were looking inward at our own makings.

The fears and ethical concerns will initially act as our guardrails and from this will come a new type of designer. The flow of change is inevitable and necessary. The inventors and entrepreneurs of our time need thoughtful, sensitive, strategically insightful minds focused, not only making the new emergent reality more human centered but human accepted.

We, the human-centered designers sit very much at the intersection of today and tomorrow and are going through changes of our own. Our roles change faster than our titles can keep up with, our industry sends us expanding and contracting our skills from specified to generalist and back to expert in a way that can be hard to follow for our clientele and the only ones who can elegantly and swiftly articulate will be us. We have many responsibilities and chief among them will be the ability to justify or validate these needs to clients long before they see the warning signs.

We will continue to craft beautiful engaging experiences and we will shine lights on the human focused horizon. The organic nature of this moment in evolution will take our skills places we can barely imagine and far past that. We know some of what what we next, creative technologists, copywriters, extended realities and I suspect behavioral psychologist too… and the very near future will call on us to make decisions that we don’t know quite who to call on for. Ethicists and actuaries will be needed soon. Autonomous vehicles are here already in a serious way and as they become more ubiquitous they implications will increase exponentially.

Today, we question the ways to make life easier, safer and more efficient. This afternoon we will start realizing that healthcare providers, automaker, transportation branches, insurance companies and researchers will want to use collective data to do heat of the moment calculations that to best direct your car in the crashes that will still happen. Tonight the train will have left the station and the only beings capable of keeping pace will be the crude AI’s that we underfunded, understaffed and undervalued earlier this morning.

And in a “Tinfoil hat” kinda statement…

When the so called robots come to take our jobs, the ones that will remain will be the for the creatives, the critical thinkers, the ones who can retain the human experience in a way that is more than acceptable to our own sensitivities and beings,

The flow of change is well underway for the wave we are riding and the undercurrent will pull a few of us in new directions. If you want to keep conversation going and help shape the puzzle, I feel we are in the right place… reach out and help us gain a forum to think more about it and how we can take measures steps to better ourselves, our world and our futures.

—Jason Lung

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