It’s quaint to burn a few seconds on your keyboard to issue pithy reports of what you’re up to, but in the future, straight-forward announcements of activities will be taken over by enhanced machines, like the Twittering stapler, that churn out the information of our lives as automatically as our bodies generate sweat during a workout.
The future will be an even smellier place.
Of course, machines can’t think. They can’t add context. They can’t explain why. (Then again, give them enough data, and all that computing and “statistical inferences” start to look like thinking.)
But they can capture time, location and, if the constraints are consistent, more complex information, such as audio, video or images, like the Twittering stapler. And then they can broadcast it.
What it will take on our part is the setting up of an information-sharing system and then the making a choice: broadcast on or broadcast off. (And Facebook would have you believe that “on” is becoming everybody’s choice.)
Yes, cable television ain’t got nothing on the future: 6.7 billion channels and counting, one for each human being.
Rudimentary versions of this have been around for a while. Their main problem is that you have to adapt your activities to the machine, rather than the other way around. The only solution I see is a human-machine integration (cyborgs) that instantly and passively translates our sensory information into shareable bits and bytes. Now we’re talking Borg, and that’s a long ways off. In the mean time, SocialBrowse, the site of which no longer loads, gives us another hint of where we’re going, according to a description of it here.