Ways Technology Will Change Our Lives Soon
By: Iram Khawaja
Tags: Flying Cars, Robots, AI, Articial Intelligence, Technology

Technology is advancing around us everywhere. It is ingrained in nearly every aspect of our lives and yet we don’t realise the extent of it.

In the upcoming years, there are going to be massive changes in the way we live our lives from flying taxis, the possibility of military robots fighting our wars alongside humans, being able to talk to twin versions of ourselves online and robots taking care of our grandmas and grandads in elderly homes.

For example, did you know there’s an AI program that studies your facial features and emotions through your camera lens to provide emotional analysis back to companies? This is called Emotion AI, part of the facial recognition technology. It allows companies to find out what you’re interested in, what you like or dislike, and how you feel towards things viewed online. Imagine being watched scrolling through Instagram, you see a video that makes you feel sad and that gets detected. BAM. Hhere’s another video that will feed into that emotion and get those tears flowing. One company working on this is Realeyes, here’s their ad:

Another mind-blowing concept that will become normal is having a virtual clone. You can also create an online doppelganger of yourself on Twitter which will create tweets that sound just like you on ChatLike.me.

Or you could live forever through technology, rather than having a Twitter clone, and actually create your own digital twin who has access to your conversations, social media accounts, pictures, and videos to see how you sound, talk, act, and think.

Luka is a start-up that created Replika — a program to create a virtual twin version of yourself and have an AI friend. The purpose of Replika is to be a digital twin to see how you behave, keep yourself or others company if lonely, and a living memorial of the dead so people can still interact with the digital version of you to stay in touch rather than feeling the loss.

Back to flying taxis, we always knew it would happen at some point but that time is coming closer and closer within the next few years. Some companies have started their test trials already. The main aim of these flying taxis is to make inner country travel much easier and quicker than going on the road by car or public transport. There are two options of air mobility — a flying taxi with a pilot which will be more costly for passengers or a pilotless flying vehicle which is the aim for uber. Some companies to look out for are Lilium, EHang, Uber Elevate, Volocopter, and Wisk.

There are so many futuristic action movies out there that include the concept of robot soldiers. We rely on machinery heavily in wars but to turn the machine into a weapon with a mind of its own is an entirely different being.

The British army has predicted to have 30,000 robot soldiers by 2030 which makes up a quarter of its population. This may sound like an effective way to make up for the decrease in enrolment and fewer human lives lost in the long run but there is an overall fear of more harm being done by robots being weaponised for the wrong reasons and getting out of control. A campaign group called Stop Killer Robots is fighting to get rid of this possibility.

Lastly, I mentioned robots taking care of elderly people to keep them company as friends or to actually help look after them. The idea seems sweet but how real can they become and will they be preferred over actual human interaction?

There are a lot of questions, along with a mix of fear and excitement for what the future holds. Personally, I’m a little wary of how the next decade will be but either way, this is our reality and we’re already on the journey, so we can just make the most out of the endless possibilities technology offers.