Flameless candles, iphone cameras, deep dark web, driverless cars!
It sure feels like we’re living in a multi-dimensional world! Not that long ago, many people didn’t have a camera, coffee had to be brewed by the pot, items had to be plugged into wall sockets, people read newspapers for the latest info, and food had to be roasted, fried, grilled, or steamed. Today, things are fast. People want instant results.
I find myself tapping impatiently onto this wireless miracle of an ipad if it’s not presenting me immediately with the latest in the moment news, weather, or facts. I must remind myself to take a breath, realize and appreciate the fact that my request is being beamed to a satellite circling the globe, where trillions of connections are being made every second, to beam back to me my heart’s desire. Awesome!!! As of today, this moment, since it continually increases each second, there are 15,958,491,240 people, processes, data, and things connected to the internet! Check out Cisco Connections Counter sometime, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-connections-counter.
To encourage futuristic thinking, a robot contest was begun in April, 2012, by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It also runs the Dept of Defense shots to the moon. The contest has been going on over the years with eliminations, semi-finals, and finally this June 5, 2015, the finalists will compete at a fairground outside LosAngeles for $3.5 million in prize money. The free standing wireless robots are being pushed to the limit to perform 8 actions like driving a car, crossing a debris field, and using a hand drill, one after another, in an one hour time frame. The key here is that each group ultimately contributes another piece to the puzzle, a launch base that often gets bought up, developed and eventually turned into fantastic creations like self-driving cars, and mechanical skeletons for the paralyzed. To be honest, robots are unpredictable at this point, with handlers attempting to teach them to read body sensors and get some sort of awareness of their limbs without freezing up or falling over. It will be an interesting contest.
In this age of brilliant young creative minds taking ideas and channeling them into miracles, let’s hope the focus will be on guiding the innovators to the light, to the unbelievably dynamic growing future that lies ahead of us, to the potential to improve the world for so many. It’s an amazing time to be living!
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