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Nowadays there’s lots of discussion about Apple’s iPhone, and Google’s Nexus One Android.  These are among the latest smartphones, which place all kinds of interesting new functionality into the hands of users.  They’ve generated lots of excitement.  In some ways, they’re great poster children for technology.

My own history is that I was part of the smartphone world since long before anyone heard of the iPhone or Nexus One.

For example, here’s an excerpt from a press release made as long ago as June 1999:

SYMBIAN RELEASES LATEST EPOC TECHNOLOGY FOR FUTURE SMARTPHONES AND COMMUNICATORS

Symbian today announced the launch of its latest EPOC technology with the public issue of EPOC Release 5 to developers and licensees. This latest release provides significant feature and architectural advances that will allow licensees to rapidly develop Smartphones and Communicators to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of mobile users…

David Wood, Executive Vice President, Technical Consulting, Symbian, said “Symbian’s latest EPOC technology provides improved functionality, stronger support and even better tools – all of which are committed to helping companies create a flood of new applications to help drive the WID industry. These applications will address the needs of mobile users by allowing them to be in-touch, in-control and in-formed, wherever they are.”

In case anyone wonders: “WID” was short for “Wireless Information Device” – an acronym that (perhaps unsurprisingly) failed to catch on.  And “EPOC” was the original name for the Symbian OS platform.  I’ll say more about the meaning of “EPOC” later…

As one of the software architects who designed and implemented EPOC – and subsequently as one of the executive founding team at Symbian – I had the pleasure to craft software which, by the latest estimates, has since found its way into one third of a billion mobile phones worldwide.

However, my topic at Humanity+, UK 2010 will not be Symbian, Nexus One, or the iPhone.  It will be about what’s coming next – or what’s potentially coming next.

Instead of Nexus One, think Nexus Six.  That’s a different kind of Android – not a phone, but a science fiction entity that’s part human, part machine.  Androids featured in Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which in turn inspired the 1982 classic film Blade Runner.  Pictured is Rachael, one of the Nexus Six models.  (She thinks she’s human…)

Hold on, did I say that Androids were science fiction?  Well, that’s the interesting question.

The same fast progress of technology which has resulted in ever-more powerful smartphones is also putting within our reach the possibility of significant enhancements for humans.  If we choose, we may soon find ourselves able to be smarter, stronger, faster, kinder, and happier, than at any previous time in history.  In some minds, that’s a scary thought.  The full extent of progress with nanotech, synthetic biology, AI, robotics, etc, is hard to fathom.  It’s the combinations of these technologies which are especially hard to predict.

Apple supremo Steve Jobs has made a habit of breakthrough product announcements: the iPod, the iPhone, and now (depending on opinion) the iPad.  Perhaps one day in, say, 10-20 years time, Steve Jobs (or one of his successors) will stand up on stage and announce the iHeadset, the iBrain, the iHeart, or maybe even the iHuman.

Is that a future we should admire, or one we should fear?  Is it just a distracting fantasy, or something we need to start anticipating now (to ensure that we’re not taken by a very nasty surprise one morning)?

That’s the context for the opening remarks I’ll be making at the event on 24th April.  It’s my task that day to set the scene for the presentations to follow – outlining key questions about the role of innovative technology in assisting the realisation of human potential in the midst of troubled times and major societal disruption over the next 15-25 years.  To my mind, these are topics of the highest importance.

In short, I don’t see this “iHuman” future as necessarily “inhuman”.  Technology, wisely deployed, can dramatically enhance human experience, at both the personal and societal level.  Rather than the term “iHuman”, I prefer “Humanity+“.

Footnote

Hmm, perhaps the term “eHuman” would be a handy alternative.  Here, ‘e’ stands in the first instance for “enhanced”.  But I’ve got something else in mind too.  I recall the habit of Colly Myers, the first CEO of Symbian (and the author of very large parts of the original EPOC software), of prefixing the name of every software module with the letter ‘e’.  Thus the window server was “ewsrv” and the file server was “efsrv”.  This ‘e’ stood for “EPOC”.  And according to at least some stories, the ‘E’ at the start of “EPOC” stood for “electronic”.  It makes you wonder: just how far will electronics take us?

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