“Let’s change the world together. Wearable technology is taking the world into new realms, making technology personal and seamless to use. MAKE IT WEARABLE is a global initiative to inspire ideas and fuel innovation that will evolve personal computing in exciting new ways.” – Intel
The “Make It Wearable” competition is made up of two different tracks: the VISIONARY track and the DEVELOPMENT track. The VISIONARY track challenged the registered teams to dream of what could be developed in which would shift our perceptions of the world and improve it at the same time. Registration began in February of this year and its winners were selected just a few months ago. The DEVELOPMENT track, on the other hand, challenged its registered teams to execute on feasible innovations that would push disruptive technologies into commercialized products. Registration began this summer and have just recently selected its finalists. The winners will be announced on November 3.
Intel's "Make It Wearable" Finalists
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
This month the private nonprofit organization Brookings Institution released a report entitled, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications.” Its authors went into meticulous detail as to how wearable technologies are introducing humans to bio-computing, and thus the formation of symbiotic relationships between organic life and technological systems. They even went as far as calling us “Baby Cyborgs” from where we stand today.
“Today we may be baby cyborgs, our reliance on certain technologies increasing quantifiably, but at some point we will be looking at a qualitative change—a point at which we are truly no longer using those technologies but have sufficiently fused with them…”
In June of this year, during the conclusions of landmark Supreme Court case Riley v. California, Chief Justice John Roberts, who’d written for all eight justices of the Supreme Court, noted that modern cell phones were “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” In which case, I couldn’t agree more!
Intel’s “Make It Wearable” competition is just the beginning of our Cyborg future. As technologies continue exponentially growing, and as millions of more people worldwide become connected online, we’ll soon bear witness to the rise of a Cyborg Nation. There won’t be such a thing as “offline” or “online,” but rather a systematic and symbiotic way of life. And there’ll be those who’ll oppose such a Nation, such as the neo-Luddite organization “Stop the Cyborgs,” but they’ll go the way of the Amish – disconnected, though living as they please – while the rest of us will evolve and expand into the cosmos. See you all there!
Photo Credit: Intel Corporation