Well my fiancee just got her laser eye surgery got last week and has been busy throwing away her contact lenses and eyeglasses like she’s been trying to rid herself of all traces of an ex-boyfriend. I’ve been talking to a lot of people who have gotten the surgery  and it seems like I’m the only one that hasn’t gotten this life changing enhancement. I’m starting to feel like a myopic Neanderthal with my astigmatic eyeglasses and imperfect vision. I mean I forgot my glasses the other day and work was a pain all day.  The only problem is that my vision isn’t bad enough to warrant a couple thousand dollars on elective surgery.  My only hope is that someday in the near future there will be another type of elective surgery that will give me abilities above and beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.

This is what I’m talking about. Not that this is any news to anyone who’s been reading Kurzweil or Vinge lately, or even keeping up with advancements in technology. I figured it would be a good oppourtunity to remind you all of how totally awesome the future will be. Screw flying cars, we’ve got TV in our eyes. How’s that for some goddamn advancement?

Vinge covered this scenario really well in Rainbow’s End. Pretty much everyone had these contact lens overlays attached to their wearable computers and could put pretty much anything into the environment that they wanted. This concept is called augmented reality and is already making its way into society through video games and the like. One of the major plot points in Rainbow’s End involves real life role play games where the participants use overlays to make the opposing teams look like nights in armor or strange creatures and what have you. It’d be as if you were playing paintball and the overlays made it look like your team was dressed like WWII Allied soldiers and all the opposing team were dressed as Nazis.  Of course this new technology could also be used for stuff like reading web pages and emails; of course we know it will mostly be used for pornography and cybersexing.

So how about this futurist that they quote in the Telegraph article, Ian Pearson. Where does one get a degree in futurism, cause I want to sign up. Talk about a bullshit job title. Oh, I get it, you work for BT and get to make vauge generalized predictions about shit so far ahead that no one’s going to be able to call you on your crap when you’re wrong. What, it’s 2019 and I still don’t have video games beamed directly onto my retina? “Oh, sorry, I made that prediction 10 years ago so you can’t hold it against me now. ” Let me go start a new career spouting off about how we’ll all be living in Minority Report in 20 years and hopefully I can get my name in a poorly written article in a tabloid mag.

Sure, I knew MP3s were gonna blow up 10 years ago and I’m plenty sure we’re going to see Singularity in 20 years. Does that mean that I get to put ‘Futurist’ on my email signature and start making all kinds of cockamamie predictions about technology? And what about this ‘emotional tattoo’ and ‘emotional viewing’? “Here’s a tattoo for you to wear during this movie. During the action scenes we’ll be injecting adrenenaline into your bloodstream so you can really feel the action like the hero on screen. And in case you’re a heartless bastard and aren’t sufficiently manipulated by our generic melodramatic death scene, we’ll be hitting you with a fast acting depressant to make sure you’re bawling your eyes out at the proper moment.”  Don’t even get me started that this last part is coming from Comet, which is some kind of European Radio Shack. Something tells me they watched Strange Days too many times and it infiltrated thier subconscious a bit too deeply.  Coment needs to stick to selling LCDs and leave predictions about what year we’ll see a space elevator to Best Buy.

Back to contact lens displays: FUCK YEAH. Why stop there? Why just a overlay that fits over your eyeball? How about a projector in my cornea that blocks outside reality completely? I mean why should I have to keep glancing sideways to read something when I’m trying to ignore someone talking to me when I can just not see them at all? I already spend 80% of my waking day staring at a monitor, why not just have that thing beaming on all day and night? Plus people won’t be able to tell I’m ignoring them completely when I’m staring right at them. Kinda gives it away when I have to look off to the side to read my feeds.

So while Mr. Pearson thinks we’re 10 years away from contact lens TVs we can be sure that inter-corneal displays will be soon to follow, a fact that no doubt scares the shit out of most of the people I know along with most of the other things we’ll see in the future, like human level artifical intelligences and other cybernetic enhancements such as memory augmentations.