THE SMART DECADE

We are living at a time when what we used to think of as “science fiction” is now the science we are familiar with every day. All those things that authors like Philip K. Dick (whose novel inspired the legendary motion picture Blade Runner) or William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (with The Jetsons) used to dream about (or, in some cases, fear), from the 1960s through the 1980s, we now see all around us in our everyday lives. Some of the common electronic devices we use have fulfilled the dreams of Bruno Bianchi, when he created Inspector Gadget, except that they are contained in a smartphone, rather than a cyborg police detective.

In the fields of science, medicine, and engineering, technology has progressed to limits we could only have imagined once, as we left the movie theater after having seen Terminator. Robots and advanced artificial intelligence are a reality now, equipped with tools that make their jobs easier for many people working on behalf of the wellbeing of society. But there are other kinds of technology. What about all that domestic technology, the kind we use every day at home, in our cars, or at the gym?

We are coming to the end of a decade marked mainly by the appearance and use of smartphones and social media, and everything seems to indicate that the next decade will continue in the same direction. The fact that the present decade is ending with devices such as “smart TV” and “smartwatches” suggests that a “smart decade” is on its way.

What else could be “smart”? A good example of what we can expect to see over the next decade is Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear, a kind of “smart sunglasses.” These Huawei sunglasses are hands-free and equipped with stereo sound and 128-millimeter loudspeakers. They can be manipulated by touch along the sides, in ways that can be personalized, using AI Life apps for Android and Eyewear for iOS. For example, a call can be answered by tapping on the left side of the glasses, or the volume can be adjusted by sliding a finger forwards or backwards along the right side.

We are coming to understand that this concept of “smart” has to do with making a device as multifunctional as possible. Can a laptop computer be even smarter than it is? Well, Asus has come up with a way for its devices to multitask, using double screens. On the one hand, we have the Asus VivoBook

S15, whose trackpad can be converted into a touchpad. The idea is that the touchpad can perform certain secondary tasks. For example, if the user is working on a document in Word, the browser can be opened on the touchpad, perhaps to change a song on Spotify, or to make shortcuts for commands likes Copy, Paste, Italics, or Bold. In this way, the user does not need to be constantly opening and minimizing windows: it is simpler and faster to be able to do several things at the same time. But Asus has taken this concept to an even higher level with its Zephyrus Duo 15. In this case, the touchpad is much larger, so the tasks performed on it can be much more complex. For example, the user can be on a video conference on the main screen, while at the same time working on a document or reading something on the secondary screen.

Another common household device that tends to make use of the latest technology is the videogame console. And the new decade begins in fact with a new generation of both Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The interesting thing about these new devices is that they are no longer designed just for playing: we are able to see things in much greater detail, down the pores on the face of Geralt de Rivia in The Witcher 3, played by Henry Cavill in the Netflix series. These new consoles are conceived to be the entertainment center of everybody’s rec room. We can watch Blu-ray movies on them and even stream content such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and the brand new Disney+. In the future, we can just leave all our home entertainment needs to Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

The brand, however, that is taking the concept of “smart” the farthest is definitely Xiaomi, with its Xiaomi Ecosystem. What is this ecosystem? According to the Chinese brand (and not to get bogged down in details), it is a series of up to 2,000 everyday household products, from lightbulbs to skateboards, and including coffeemakers, pressure cookers, stoves, air purifiers, televisions, security cameras, scales, and many others.

All of these devices can be connected by Bluetooth, through the Xiaomi Home app, to your smartphone and manipulated from it. So whether it is a matter of adjusting the brightness of a lightbulb, getting notification of when the rice is ready, keeping your home safe with security cameras, seeing how far you went on your skateboard, or checking your body water percentage on the scale, Xiaomi makes everything “smart.”

This is the decade that is awaiting us. And we haven’t even looked at some technology that already exists ―and that raises ethical and moral issues―, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which basically tries to make our brains themselves a little “smarter.” Perhaps we are closer than we think to that day when we can charge our cellphone by leaving it out in the sun (Apple’s ecological proposal for its iPhone 12) or when we don’t have to worry about running into someone vaguely familiar on the street and having nothing to say (thanks to Neurolink, which will bring up data about the person through facial recognition). Our own moral compass is the only thing keeping us from entering into a cyberpunk scenario, because within the next decade all this technology will be within our reach, on the shelves of the nearest department store, or ― to stay in the same mood― two or three clicks away on Amazon.

Mauro Orozco Moreno

He is a communicologist from Univa and a historian from the University of Guadalajara. His professional experience includes teaching, advertising and journalism. He is co-founder of the website Operación Gamer, in which since 2018 he is dedicated to video game journalism. He has collaborated with portals such as Level Up o XatakaMX.