The next interface will be thought

Need for speed

Think of your busy day. You are in such a hurry in your physical life even your smartphone is not flexible enough to use to answer a thread in Slack, Reddit, Twitter or whatever. You know the feeling when someone’s wrong in the Internet, don’t you? Or you’re driving a car and need directions, quickly. You wish your smart device could understand you, without typing.

There are talk interfaces, but they make a lot of mistakes and are really cumbersome to use. And you need to talk, even you’re in a public place. And listening is so slow compared to reading. What if your smartphone could read (and write) your mind?

It’s funny to look back a time where there were no Internet or mobile phones and think about what is fast or slow anyway. Yet here we are, having magic powers of the Internet in our pockets, thinking how slow and hard it is to type or talk with our smartphone.

Let’s get back to the interface of thought. Elon Musk launched Neuralink couple of months ago. There’s other interesting projects going on as well. It’s not a new idea to connect brain and computer. Stephen Hawkings have tested such devices for years now. But when Elon Musk launches something, he’s usually on to something big – quite literally.

I bet the next Siri or Alexa will read your mind. Or actually there won’t be any personal assistant anymore, because you will be having a conversation with your computer the same way you have conversations with yourself (mostly): by thinking. It will be revolutionally. Just think about the possibilities. Just think about the situations where you could multitask just by…thinking.

It’s also a scary thought. But if you could have seen the world we have today 20 years ago you would have been shocked. The way we’re connected, watched, linked and multitasking today is scary.

Welcome future, you are in our thoughts!