Speech - Alex Wyllie

Today, we stand at an epoch in our technological capabilities. Never before have we been able to project images into thin air using ultrasound. Never before have we been able to 3d-print parts for almost anything. Never before have we used haptic feedback to allow someone to feel another’s heartbeat. Never before have we been one tap, one click, one enter key away from everybody else in the world. Standing here, using technology that 10 years ago, we would have never even dreamed of, our society no longer resembles anything we would have recognized ten years ago. Hacker geeks living in their mother’s basements are now the zillionaires ruling our world. We continue to make breakthroughs in the most advanced areas of science at an almost unprecedented rate, creating new consumer available technologies every day that would rival the power of the whole world ten years ago. However, it seems we have all the technology we want. Looking at science fiction, there are few consumer technologies that we have undeveloped. The ideas from the explosions of sci-fi in the 60s and 80s have run out. So what’s next?

In ancient rome, people believed that they were at the pinnacle of time-keeping. They had improved upon the technologies of the Ancient Greeks, developing a sundial so advanced that every chiseled mark was exact. In the 15th century however, sundials were made obsolete by spring clocks - clocks as we imagine today, full of spinning gears. It was far more accurate than a sundial, and worked on cloudy days and rainy nights, irregardless of the season. The Romans didn’t see this coming, indeed, it happened long after the fall of their empire, and yet it was an advance nobody could have predicted.

The future of consumer technology has already been invented. It has yet to pick up as much steam as those developing it would like, but the technology is here. What if, when you look up at the stars, the constellations appear, superimposed over your vision? What if you could send your heartbeat to someone you love? What if you could create a virtual world, and explore it at a level more personal than ever before? While wearable technology has yet to hit mainstream, it promises all of these things and more. 

I invite you all to consider something bigger than the announcement of the original iPod. Not a thousand songs in your pocket, but an entire world right in front of your eyes. The advent of this new era of technology should prove to change our society. The company that arrives first to deliver quality wearable technology could do more to change how we live than Apple, Microsoft, and Google combined, as we are introduced to something so amazing, that we had barely imagined it.

Wearable technology may seem promising, but we must also find it’s uses, much as we found new uses for clocks when they replaced the sundial. In addition to everything that our previous computing technology does, it already promises new features, and being ever-present, will inspire yet new ideas still untouched by the human mind. With these new technologies, the possibilities are endless. Yes, the same has been said for just about every piece of technology ever, but it has always been exaggerated. To what extent, we learn only moving to the next technology. And indeed, we have done much with our tablets and phones and phablets, but wearable technology may let us do so much more.