The fun side of future tech
You’ve already seen how living spaces can be enhanced with digital lighting, which can include changing colors and projections of moving images. Throw in digital sound, and even some subtle haptic vibration in the seat cushions, and you can dial up the perfect environment to suit the mood of any occasion. Until recently, if you wanted to add the sense of smell, you might have used an air freshener or perhaps some scented candles or incense sticks. But soon your digital console may also include a menu of aromas.
Digital scent technology is already used extensively, improving security by detecting drugs, explosives, and toxic materials. Now, much in the same way that 3D printers assemble materials from small particles, so too digital devices can produce a range of aromas by combining different chemicals. Knowledgebases are being assembled linking molecules to more than 5,000 different scents. The Google AI team, with its Principal Odor Map (POM) (https://blog.research.google/2022/09/digitizing-smell-using-molecular-maps.html), is one of the leading pioneers in this field. And Vermont-based OVR Technology (https://ovrtechnology.com) is working on incorporating digital smell directly into VR headsets.
Think of the fun you could have at parties. Or if you wanted to get rid of some unwelcome guests, just dial up a few powerful, repugnant odors. But don’t give away the secret. You can just say: “Sorry, it must be something I ate.”
Dial-a-joke
While we’re in a playful mood, let’s see if we can dial up some digital humor. Just for fun, I asked our new old friend ChatGPT to tell me a really funny joke. It came back with: “Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything!” And just to let me know it was supposed to be funny, it attached a smile emoji. At least its response to my request for an AI joke was a little better: “Why did the AI go broke? It couldn’t find its cache flow!”
When I told it how lame its jokes were, it said: “I’m sorry to hear that the jokes didn’t quite hit the mark. Humor can be quite subjective. If you have any specific preferences or topics you’d like to hear jokes about, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to provide something that suits your taste!”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Until recently, generative AI has been constructing responses to natural language queries based on ingesting mega-gobs of existing narrative. Taking user preferences and ontology into account is an important next step in the evolution toward AGI (artificial general intelligence). And hopefully, better, funnier jokes!
Dial-a-KMWorld article?
Of course, I would never ask ChatGPT to write this column. Where’s the fun in that? But I do occasionally attempt to use generative AI as a source for ideas, as I did when I started writing this article.
Much to my disappointment, when I asked ChatGPT for ways that we can expect to use future technology for fun, there was very little fun evident in the responses. All of the categories discussed above, with the exception of the haptic devices, were discovered by me alone using good old-fashioned research. So until someone like Star Trek’s Noonien Soong comes along and invents a Lieutenant Commander Data complete with a humor chip, we humans will just have to step up and keep filling in the emotional gaps ourselves.
Still, I should probably brush up on my prompt engineering skills, just in case...