Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers. Self-driving cars restrict old-school human drivers to special recreation parks. And the optimal number of fingers is 12.5.



Confused? It's a vision of the world in 25 years, as dreamed up by today's researchers in computer-human interaction (CHI).

CHI normally means investigating better ways for people to interact with devices we have now, but recently attendees at a conference in Toronto, Canada, got ahead of themselves. They created an imaginary conference agenda for 2039 that predicts the kinds of challenges we will face with future computers – many of which will be implanted.

"It's meant to be sort of the fringes of human-computer interaction research, what's really edgy or provocative, "says Eric Baumer of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who dreamed up the idea of the conference. "There's a lot of retrospective thinking about the past, but there's not as much thinking about what are the futures toward which we think we're working."

New Scientist used the conference abstracts to create a list of the questions our cyborg descendants might have about computers in 2039.

Is it weird when my organs talk to each other?



