Mr Watson, come here; I want to see you,” Alexander Graham Bell famously told his assistant Thomas Watson in the first-ever telephone call made on March 10, 1876. Since then, change and activity has been the elementary theme in communications. We’re making it large: in a world where messages have been reduced to ‘brb’, ‘tk’, ‘hw r u’ and the like, X, formerly Twitter, has come up with a 10,000-character limit for its posts. One can write an essay on X now. Going small, or quantum, is the other side. Communication is set to enter the quantum realm; our very own ISRO plans to build a short-range optical quantum communication satellite, which will send encrypted data over a network, much like how WhatsApp works with end-to-end transcription, but in a more secure manner. The information will be encoded into binary values (representing 0 and 1) and then transmitted to the receiver. It will revolutionise how we communicate online. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, are also working in the field.
Big Brother is Predicting Imagine walking down the street, encountering strangers endlessly. What if you had glasses that would display the name, social media profile and other information of any person, without even having a conversation? Think of it as the person’s aura—a halo of information surrounding him or her. It’s like Tom Cruise’s 2003 film Minority Report which talks about the year 2054, when one would be able to predict crimes and stop them with clairvoyants reading and interpreting the informational aura of individuals. It’s not 2054 yet, but predictive research in law and order is making moves towards getting there. All information regarding a person of interest to law enforcers would be fed into a supercomputer and updated in real-time. Law enforcement agencies, healthcare workers, and government offices would all be in the loop to keep track of each individual.
Every Which Way One of the trends in the travel industry for the New Year is to explore little-known places. While this may sound appealing, it comes with a rider—how to communicate with people say in a remote area in Jordan, or Cameroon or Kazakhstan? Scientists are now working on a device that would allow people to communicate in real time without a common language. People across cultures can use it to understand each other, without either having to fumble for words or typing or speaking into an app. This also makes it easy to conduct business with a cross-section of people from around the world, not to mention making world leaders comfortable in alien cultures. Also, in the works is a device that would decrypt sign languages, making communication truly inclusive.
Thoughts as Words Will there come a time when we communicate by transmitting our thoughts through a network directly into someone else’s brain? This is beginning to look frighteningly real as early as now. Researchers globally are working on creating brain-computer interfaces, described best as an electronic version of telepathy. Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, has developing implantable brain-machine interface devices which will enable people suffering from paralysis to use machines and prosthetic limbs to recover their mobility without having to push a button physically. Think, and it’s done.
Likewise, NextMind has developed a device that translates signals from the brain’s visual area into digital commands. This means that computers can now be controlled with brain signals or visual imagination. Our brains are on the screen, literally. One can send and receive telepathic messages with help from an electronic device that will record messages decoded from one person’s EEG activity and transmit them directly to another person. In fact, researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated a method that could even extend to control of other people’s bodies. Wish it, think it, do it is the mantra.
