Chapter 3
Mobile
The Great Untethering
The smartphone remote control is of course the key to great untethering—the disconnection of our ability to work from a need to be at a particular fixed location. And no longer attached to our desks to get work done, we can now go down to the factory floor or out to dinner but stay connected to some critical business event that may be unfolding elsewhere. The capabilities of the average portable computing device are moving at the exponential pace of Moore's Law—processor speed, memory, network connections, all are doubling and doubling again and will continue to do so. And the role that it plays in extending our human capabilities into the superhuman is forever changing our expectations and behaviors.
There are three critical areas we will examine—the most obvious is the always-on connectivity, from which arises a new state of persistent digital engagement. But equally as important is the role our mobile computers are playing in helping us to make sense of the world—augmented or annotated reality applications that superimpose information over our physical surroundings add a sixth sense to the existing senses that we have previously relied on to navigate our physical environment. Increasingly sophisticated electronics in devices (and in the future, implants) are substantially extending our standard five senses in distance, sensitivity, and (through the cloud) ability to understand what we are sensing and even share it with others as we have ...
