Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018
Your science fiction cell phone isn’t cool enough
Things to know for when Skynet takes over
By Effie Seiberg
From the Star Trek communicator to Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, science fiction has always imagined new types of portable communication devices. However, recent science fiction hasn’t pushed this so far. Go ahead—think of a story from the last fifteen years that gives you an amazing idea for mobile computing. Chances are, real technology has already caught up to it. Usually in fiction, our scientific assumptions are too wild to work. This is the opposite: Your science fiction cell phone isn’t cool enough.
Mobile technology has evolved in a number of new directions that have made crazy cool things possible today … which means that the communicators in distant science fiction worlds haven’t taken things far enough.
The cloud
Because your phone is always connected, it does more than communicate with other machines. It can outsource to them. Massively distributed computational engines let you get difficult results on cell phones that don’t require the phone itself to be able to run the results. The Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Cortana … they can all take in what you’re saying (which needs to programmatically take into account your accent, the sounds around you, your local slang, etc.) and figure out your actual meaning. Doing this on a phone itself would be quite difficult, but because of the connectivity, your phone is as powerful as the most powerful computer cluster.
Many SF pieces show the phone as able to connect to the (nebulously-defined-yet-nearly-all-encompassing) “database.” But the fact that your phone can do more than just pull existing data—it can bring in new data and get it analyzed and returned—makes the phone in your pocket stronger than most fictional phones.
The camera
Your phone camera is smarter than you think. Because of the connectivity, your phone’s vision gets smarter not only with facial recognition (which is improving at a dramatic pace—already you can unlock your phone with a smile or the pattern of blood vessels in your eye on some platforms) but also at recognizing anything else and doing interesting things with that information. This same facial recognition is what lets Snapchat add a rainbow of vomit out of anyone’s mouth, or a flower crown to anyone’s head in real time—silly features using speedy visual analysis to tell what’s a face and where to place things around it.
CamioCam combines computer vision and machine learning to make a smarter home security camera, and all it takes is your old phone, propped up and connected to wi-fi, to do it. The processing on the back end helps figure out which types of motion aren’t interesting (moving branches in the breeze shouldn’t trigger a motion alert) and it’s improving on its ability to give specific insights. For example, in their interface you can search for “brown” to see if the UPS truck has arrived today.
MIT has released software that detects tiny changes in color in any video—even from a phone camera—that can be used to detect heart rate. Skin gets ever-so-slightly redder when blood flows underneath it. With just a propped-up phone camera and this technology running behind it, you can monitor an infant or patient’s health without plugging them into a heart rate monitor. Far more comfortable for them!
What’s more, your camera is getting better at understanding what it’s looking at. Google Lens is essentially a search box from your camera. Take a photo, and Google’s years of visual machine learning come into play—it can tell you what you’re looking at. A photo of a flower yields more information than just it’s a flower; it might tell you the species, the conditions it needs to survive, and more. A photo of a restaurant might yield information about the restaurant’s name, hours, menu, and address. And of course, this same visual analysis can translate any written sign the camera sees, so you’re never lost when traveling.
And with all this machine vision progress, including even simple things like autofocus and image stabilization, assume that blurry photos are soon to be a thing of the past.
So the camera on your phone today is probably cooler than the one in your novel draft. Go update it!
The other sensors
Phones today have GPS, accelerometers, compasses, and more. Beyond just navigating you around (and figuring out the shortest routes, even within encased structures like football stadiums), this yields a lot of messy motion data. Zendrive combines all that data to figure out when the bearer of the phone is in a car crash (as distinct from, say, someone just dropping their phone), and the technology is used by other companies to automatically call a loved one, an ambulance, or a tow truck.
Other phone sensors let you count your steps instead of getting a fitness tracker (they know what the movement of a step “looks” like). They let you play augmented reality games, where the phone overlays content on top of what the camera sees, or virtual reality games, where you’re immersed in the game—and for both of these, the other sensors let the phone know if it’s up or tilted, if you’re facing north or south, and so on, placing both you and it into the virtual play space. Your compass is actually a magnetometer, which means that metal detector apps are somewhat legit. Many phones have a barometer, which helps your fitness app know how many flights you’ve gone up.
Ambient light sensors automatically change your phone’s display when it’s light or dark out—particularly useful when you’re driving in and out of tunnels in the daytime. And even the microphone has more uses than you’d think: Apps let you “play” wind instruments like a digital ocarina by blowing into the mic and covering the instrument “holes” on the screen with your fingers.
So if your science fiction phone can’t do any of these things … you need a darn good reason.
Contextual adaptability
Between phones knowing your location, motion, and a fair portion of your activity, they can already adapt to their situations. Motorola and Apple already have a phone setting that automatically reads texts and emails out loud when it detects that the person is in a moving car so people don’t text and drive (yes, they let you opt out overall, or if you specify that you’re not the driver). Google’s Android will pull up different suggestions (weather, events it thinks you’ll like, etc.) depending on where you are and what you’ve recently been searching for. Even Twitter will recommend different trending tweets depending where you and your phone are.
In addition, if your phone knows where you are in relation to other objects it can interact with, it can make them behave accordingly. There are already smart locks for your front door that unlock when your phone is in proximity, and lights and ambient music you can program to turn on when your phone is in a certain range or area. Your phone can be your TV remote, it can automatically start certain smart coffeemakers when the sun goes up, and so much more.
And, while Motorola and Proteus Digital Health have developed the “authentication vitamin” pill, which turns on when it hits your gastric juices and broadcasts out an authentication code for your phone or other device, it’s easy to imagine this expanding to include turning on different things depending on the state of your stomach. (Alerts for gyms nearby, perhaps?)
Your science fiction phone needs to step it up
If all these things are happening today, your futuristic phone had better be much cooler. With the combination of the Internet of Things, where more items are connected, plus constant connectivity, phones almost act more like the terminals of yore than a stand-alone gadget. They can access any piece of information, from anywhere, and with any amount of processing needed. Plus, their sensors make them much smarter about what’s going on around them for things that aren’t already connected.
But more than just being a piece of technology in itself or being an extension of the technology in the world, the phone is now an extension of you. Your habits, your locations, your preferences … the more the phone knows about your context, the more it shifts into an extension of your wants and needs into the real world and acts upon them for you.
When writing your own phone/communicator/bracer/whatever you’d like to call it, remember all the things that the phone in your pocket can already do. Phones of the future should be at least this cool, if not far cooler. With that said, Go-Go-Gadget-Kickass-Future-Phone!