Man of 2022

[Yuli Ban]

Believe it or not, this is another thread relaunch. Way back around 2014, I created a thread called "Man of 2020" where I wondered a good deal about what ought to be possible by 2020 to create a primitive transhuman. I intended on redoing that thread in its host year, but when 2020 actually came around, I had completely forgotten about it.

Better late than never? Because what I posited in that original thread actually wound up coming true.

I was thinking about this last night, about what it would take to create a "Man of 2022," someone augmented with the best (noninvasive) technology we have right now (regardless of commercial availability).

What I came up with:

• Wireless Earbuds
• Wearable Smartphone
• Brain-Computer Interface
• Smartglasses
• Powered Exoskeleton

We have all of these available to us in some form, as I hoped we would, but not all are easily available.

#1: Wireless earbuds. I personally use wireless headphones just because they're easier to keep up with, but I do plan on making the plunge into earbuds soon enough. Still, the song played is that of wireless technology. It allows for ease of motion, plus wires look pretty kitsch (wirehead cyberpunk fantasies notwithstanding). You can get wireless earbuds for under $30. They're so normalized that we've forgotten how futuristic they are. Compared to 2014: we certainly had wireless earbuds back then as well, but they were far more expensive.

#2: Wearable smartphones. Again, we're so used to smartphones that we've forgotten that they are essentially pocket supercomputers. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we have to imagine pairing them up with said wireless earbuds without it being too obtrusive. Luckily we do this all the time via arm straps. I have such a holder. You can get them for under $10, or simply tape your smartphone onto your arm if you're feeling particularly cheap. An alternative is the smartwatch, yet another futuristic innovation that no longer feels futuristic. Compared to 2014: again, we obviously had smartphones in 2014; we even had smartwatches in 2014 (I remember my distinct sense of awe at seeing them that year and realizing that they were already becoming passe to people). Indeed, when I said I have a smartphone holder, guess which year I bought it. It was entirely because of that original thread that I decided to get a smartphone holding strap just to revel in the sense of having some sort of "wearable tech."

#3: Brain-Computer interface. Probably the most advanced technology possible to have, the kinds of BCIs we're playing with are of an entirely new generation.


You can get EEG headsets for any range of prices, from under $50 for certain toys all the way to several thousands of dollars for higher end tools. But $200-$400 is the price point for things like Emotiv or OpenBCI's headsets which you can train to write text and play simple video games.
As for the REALLY interesting stuff, the MEG and fNIRS headsets, those are much more expensive. But they're certainly coming. I can imagine that next-gen MEG headsets will allow us to write with our thoughts at one word per second at least, if not faster than that. And that's among other tasks like controlling electronics— such as, say, using a phone or smartglasses.
Compared to 2014, I had no knowledge of the different kinds of BCIs besides EEG being noninvasive and the direct-brain stimulation methods being invasive. I was focused on noninvasive BCIs and imagined a superpowered $100,000 EEG headset shaped like a Gray alien head that one could wear. As it turns out, you CAN feasibly get something like the Kernel Flux for around $100,000 (estimated at least), and it certainly has an alien-like quality to it, but you won't be able to bring it anywhere you wish.

#4: Smartglasses and XR HMDs. This is what excited me the most in 2014, not the least because of the hype wrought by the Oculus Rift and its followers, giving us things like Meta Pro's Space Glasses, Avegant Glyph, CastAR, and more. Unsurprisingly, the HMD space has blossomed and advanced in the decade since then, and it's become clearer that augmented reality in 2014 was a magic trick, whereas it's on the verge of commercialization now. In fact, it already HAS begun commercialization

It's just one of many, and much more advanced glasses are coming soon.
So that dream I had of walking around my college campus wearing smartglasses circa 2014 is possible now. You can get these for $599. I can only imagine the capability coupled with a good BCI.
Compared to 2014, the HMD space is vastly more advanced in every regard. The dream of the MetaPro Space Glasses has finally come to fruition, and the embarrassing failure of Google [Gl]Ass is all but forgotten.

#5: Powered Exoskeletons. We heard of exoskeletons all throughout the 2010s, and the most famous pair was Cyberdyne's HAL Suit, but only because of the name of the thing. These days, it is possible to snag a powered exoskeleton for an actual dollar amount, but unfortunately it's a bit pricey— tens of thousands no matter who you go with. My personal favorite has to be Sarcos Guardian XO, but that's one of the most expensive of the lot at $100,000 a year. Still, even personal computers cost thousands upon thousands of dollars in the beginning.

Compared to 2014: It's still early in the development of exoskeletons, but we're further along than we were in 2014 all things considering.


All in all, it is possible to become a techno-augmented cyborg in the year 2022 if you have enough money. It'll be cumbersome all things considering and I certainly wouldn't go about my daily life this way, but give it another 20 years and that might be a different story.

Starspawn0 addition: There are also cochlear implants and visual-to-touch "monitors". About visual-to-touch monitors: people have run experiments where little arrays of skin vibrators that vibrate if the corresponding pixels in a video image are "activated" (i.e. if an object passes in front that pixel). Over time, people's brains and skin tactile neurons rewire so that they are able to recognize images just given that tactile input.

So, you can have eyes in the back of your head, by placing these arrays on your back, and then putting a tiny flat camera on the back of your shirt. Nobody could surprise you, as you'd be able to see from all angles.

[TrueAnimationFan]

Maybe you should try rebooting this concept by imagining the "Man of 2030". What few things would you envision having improved considerably by then?

[Yuli Ban]

Well, a Man of 2030 could definitely just be an updated version of the Man of 2020. I foresee the exact same things defining such a person, but with much more mature technology. This is because I just don't foresee too many overwhelmingly massive upheavals in personal tech coming this decade.


• Wireless Earbuds: most likely going to become even cheaper, such as dropping in price enough to be sold in dollar/pound stores. Wireless earbud apps should be much more advanced to boot, such as allowing people to hear far more clearly rather than just listening to music. There might be early versions of lightly-invasive earpieces. However, I doubt most consumers will adopt invasive technology, at least not this half-century. Not unless it can be swallowed, or is medical in nature. There is ONE exception, but it's for something down below...

• Wearable smartphones: flexible tech may be more advanced, but I have a hunch most smartphones will still be static rectangles. So if you want to feel like a cyborg, wearing one on a wrist strap remains viable. Smartwatches will still be around too, and advances in voice recognition ought to bridge some (but not all) of the gap between them and phones. However, smartphones have proven to be an unexpectedly perfect device, existing at the cross-section of ergonomics and capability. They won't be easy to replace. But that's perfectly fine, because smartphones of 2030 ought to be the equivalent of supercomputers from 2010. It'll be like every person carrying a K Computer on their bodies which, coupled with the following, will absolutely make us like cyborgs.

• Brain-Computer Interfaces: Kernel's devices ought to be much cheaper and more commercialized. Similarly, we ought to see what Open Water is up to at some point. If it really matters, invasive BCIs will be further along, thanks to Stentrode and Neuralink. But for the most part, I bet MEG and portable MRI BCIs will be the new dominant paradigm and will allow for texting by thinking, cyberkinesis, and neurofeedback. Plus there's the side effect of high quality neurofeedback data supercharging artificial intelligence, which could accelerate a few trends and keep AI progress accelerating even as Moore's Law finally gives out. At the very least, commercial BCIs will be past EEG, which is a notoriously noisy and low-resolution method.

• Mixed reality: MUCH further along. Possibly the biggest thing mentioned by this point. Apple AR might be the inflection point, but by 2030, augmented/mixed reality will be mainstream. So much so that the rise of cyborg glasses alone will cause futureshock. Voice and gesture control will be dominant, but those aforementioned BCIs will go a long way too. A Man of 2030 should be able to walk through a park and have each tree and animal be identified by species. Other aspects like full-color night vision should also be feasible.
This is also where I can see the aforementioned possibility of invasive technology being slightly widespread: smart contact lenses. I don't see them taking off in any major way this decade, but they'll definitely advance into something impressive and usable by 2030. Like, more than "we see them appear in news stories from time to time"— they're actually something you can buy, but they cost a fortune, aren't super practical for the common consumer just yet, and are about a decade behind full-fledged HMDs. Of course a decade behind HMDs of 2030 means they have the functionality of HMDs of around today, and HMDs are certainly usable as of the present, so that's more praise than anything. What smart contacts will need in the future is progress in BCIs.

• Powered exoskeletons: these I see remaining expensive, but they'll be a more widespread sight. As most physical jobs likely won't be automated just yet, heavy manual labor will probably be where you're most likely to see these. There and on battlefields. But if you're an eccentric billionaire, there's no reason to not own one. Maybe pared-down versions could become common— muscle reinforcements, limb braces, and whatnot. Things that aren't very obtrusive but nevertheless increase your active pulling/pushing strength several times over.

A Man of 2030 also ought to have:

• Invasive biotrackers. Another possible invasive technology! These being ingestible machines that keep track of your body's health, your dietary needs, and any ailments. This can be used with a cognitive agent to plan your future diet and health checkups if you so desire. A more globo-dystopia would make these mandatory, but I think 2030 is too soon for that.

• Fitness trackers. These could easily couple with smartwatches and wearable smartphones.

• Cybernetic mask. The pandemic ought to be over within EIGHT years, but technologically advanced masks could serve a purpose. They could filter the air in polluted places, protect your privacy, change your voice, and who knows what. I can see some being combined with HMDs and BCIs to bring that old "alien head" concept to life.

• Digital exocortex. Combined with the XR HMDs, BCIs, and smartphones, you ought to have an advanced array of cognitive agents to help you out along your day, AIs that you can very easily interact with in natural language and, increasingly, natural thought that can act as additions to your own mental capabilities in real time. These cognitive agents will make GPT-3 look like a 90s chatbot in comparison. Even a person using their exocortex just on a smartphone, on a PC screen, or as a smarthome will be much more "connected," but a person using the full array of abilities offered by modern tech— a Man of 2030 in other words— will almost seem to be superhuman by modern standards.

And remember, this is all a conservative look at what ought to be possible by 2030, using tech that already exists RIGHT NOW (the only really iffy example being the ingestible biotracker, which is still somewhat experimental)— even the digital exocortex is already a thing right now in rudimentary form, let down only by the relative stupidity of most apps necessary for it to work since the engines necessary to bring cognitive agents to life still lie with otherwise expensive transformer neural networks. It shouldn't even take a decade for the likes of GPT-3, even GPT-4 to be easily usable on a smartphone. A Man of 2030 should absolutely seem weakly-transhuman to us, despite the fact they aren't using too much in the way of true invasive augmentations, thus showing off the gradual cyborgization of humankind.

[Yuli Ban]

Is there anything I might have missed that others think will be possible by 2030?

[Tadasuke]

In 2030 we will carry foldable smartphones with wireless earbuds. There's zero chance than a 2030 smartphone will be equivalent to the K Computer from 2011. K Computer could do 21 petaflops of single-precision standard parallel compute and had 1.3 petabytes of RAM. Even a desktop PC from 2030 won't have such specs, let alone a smartphone. Nvidia managed to increase teraflops by 20x in 10 years. Laptops RAM only doubled and VRAM quadrupled in 10 years.

Apple will introduce foldable iPhones in 2025. In 2030 talking with your smartphone will be more practical than today, it will understand more and be more helpful. Smartphones and wireless earbuds will last twice as long on a single charge. Watches will have more features and will have better precision in measuring your health data. Wireless earbuds will allow for hearing augmentation and real-time language translation. AR glasses will be a niche market, because of technical limitations.

Powered exoskeletons will be a niche, but bigger than today. BCIs will be a niche for people who can't use their hands or even speak. Normal people won't use BCIs. Active masks may be in a niche use, actively filtering pathogens and everything else you better not breathe in.

EDIT: perhaps exoskeletons likes this AI-powered Cray X German Bionic exoskeleton will become popular by 2030 (I hope)

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Great thread!

[Cyber_Rebel]

• Invasive biotrackers. Another possible invasive technology! These being ingestible machines that keep track of your body's health, your dietary needs, and any ailments. This can be used with a cognitive agent to plan your future diet and health checkups if you so desire. A more globo-dystopia would make these mandatory, but I think 2030 is too soon for that.

• Fitness trackers. These could easily couple with smartwatches and wearable smartphones.

• Cybernetic mask. The pandemic ought to be over within EIGHT years, but technologically advanced masks could serve a purpose. They could filter the air in polluted places, protect your privacy, change your voice, and who knows what. I can see some being combined with HMDs and BCIs to bring that old "alien head" concept to life.

Not sure about the Cyber-mask (widespread) considering the culture, but we'd definitely see it first in asian countries at least if it's developed. I see doctors and healthcare workers in western countries or people in high-risk fields using it, kind of like with Hololens.

I think personalized medicine of the whole is something that will see more advancement this decade, especially after the pandemic, and pairs very well with wearable fitness/bio trackers. The idea of an augmented reality "doctor" was definitely accelerated once telehealth & telemedicine were more utilized during the pandemic. Funny thing is you could slate this under AR glasses/Wearable Smartphone/BCI's and start to notice a "convergence" of sorts, but it also appears to be the start of us truly merging with our technology, especially if our health is better for it.

[Tadasuke]

I do think people have been underestimating the difficulty of creating actually good AR glasses since the 1980s. I think it will take many years until we can buy them at a reasonable price like $399. From what I tested, current AR glasses are ... bad, not worth buying. We need much, much wider field of view and computer specs. We need SoCs that provide many teraflops per watt, not many watts per teraflops. To create realistic environments for example you would need at least a petaflop ... in your glasses ... or on servers transmitting the image to your HMD. I am not a fan of doing everything in the cloud, I am more of edge-computing guy. I think we we need orders of magnitude better energy efficiency for actually good HMDs. Current field of view is abysmally small and HMDs themselves are clunky. There has been progress since 2014, but not a huge one. Energy efficiency improvements have been getting smaller in recent years. I don't see the prospect of actually useful and comfortable AR glasses before the 2030s. People won't use glasses that need a cable connected to their smartphone. Everything would need to fit inside slick AR glasses frame. Not possible in the next few years. Batteries would have to last a full day of use.

[Vakanai]

While I don't know how affordable they are/will be, there's already masks with electronic elements out or soon to be out. Most just have air filtration and maybe microphones to be heard more clearly - but Dyson's releasing an air filter mask that also doubles as music headphones (no clue on how good they'll be as headphones, I don't think Dyson's ever done anything in the audio space before). Of course with pandemic fatigue and the truly crazy numbers of anti-maskers in the western (especially American) market, it'll probably be a niche product even in the worst case scenario that the pandemic is still ongoing by 2030 and many more millions of people have died. But definitely there'll be a large enough niche market that there'll be a few cyber masks to choose from by then I think, even if a bit pricey.

I do think people have been underestimating the difficulty of creating actually good AR glasses since the 1980s. I think it will take many years until we can buy them at a reasonable price like $399. From what I tested, current AR glasses are ... bad, not worth buying. We need much, much wider field of view and computer specs. We need SoCs that provide many teraflops per watt, not many watts per teraflops. To create realistic environments for example you would need at least a petaflop ... in your glasses ... or on servers transmitting the image to your HMD. I am not a fan of doing everything in the cloud, I am more of edge-computing guy. I think we we need orders of magnitude better energy efficiency for actually good HMDs. Current field of view is abysmally small and HMDs themselves are clunky. There has been progress since 2014, but not a huge one. Energy efficiency improvements have been getting smaller in recent years. I don't see the prospect of actually useful and comfortable AR glasses before the 2030s. People won't use glasses that need a cable connected to their smartphone. Everything would need to fit inside slick AR glasses frame. Not possible in the next few years. Batteries would have to last a full day of use.

I wouldn't be too down on it. Even the first iPhone only had about 8 hours battery life roughly (based on a very quick google search). I can definitely see AR glasses getting at least a good 5-6 hours by then, so within spitting distance. Most of a work day. Maybe over if we include a lower power mode for when you don't need it.

The short-term future of good AR glasses will get by not as solo devices, but as phone accessories. They'll be (wirelessly) paired to smartphones, with the phones taking up much of the computing work. It's not ideal, but it probably will get smart glasses to where smartphones were in 2010, or failing that to where smart watches were in 2020. So not ideal, but not bad. A good start anyway. At least that's my prediction, mostly cobbled together from where the tech is at now and what we know or is rumored to be coming from companies like Apple. I probably won't be able to justify buying one (my smartphone is not an iPhone because they are still too pricey, I got an Android from Wal-Mart), but enough people will be fine owning an Apple or Android pair of overpriced smart glasses paired to their phone that it shouldn't be an uncommon sight in 2030. At least that's my guess.

But I do think that they will be much more common and standalone and affordable by 2040 when it's more mature.