What Tech Will Replace the Smartphone?

Although it's an integral part of many people's lives today, the smartphone is bound to be replaced by the next big thing (and probably sooner than later). We explore what (and when) that might be.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hi brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Today, nearly eight in ten Americans
own a smartphone, and we've become accustomed to using them
for everything from listening to podcasts, taking pictures, reading news,
and posting on social media, to shopping and making financial transactions.

(00:22):
For many people, smartphones have even taken the place of
once common everyday implements like tape measures, flashlights, maps, and
wrist watches. Smartphones have transformed everyday life so much that
it's easy to forget that they only became popular a
little bit more than ten years ago. That's when Apple
released the iPhone, which combined mobile internet access and computing
power with a multi touch screen interface, making it possible

(00:43):
to do pretty much everything by tapping and flipping with
one fingertip or two. A recent survey found that smartphone
users now spend about five hours a day using their devices,
which is why it's tough to walk down a crowded
sidewalk in any major city without bumping into someone fixated
upon his or her screen. But with technological process moving
at broadband speed these days, we have to think that

(01:04):
the smartphone as we know it has A limited life
expectancy survey of smartphone users across the world by Ericsson,
the Swedish communications, technology and services company, found that one
in two people expected that the smartphone would become obsolete
by which leads to the big question, what's going to
replace the smartphone? Prognosticators predict that advances in technologies such

(01:28):
as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and wearable electronics
will spawn a new generation of devices that could change
our everyday existence even more than the smartphone did. We
spoke with Jack Aldrich, a futurist who helps business people
figure out how to understand and benefit from emerging trends.
They said, the transition we're about to experience is that
we're going to go from accessing the internet to living

(01:50):
in the Internet. We don't have a suitably zeitgeisty name
for those gadgets, but it's a pretty safe bet that
they won't be palm sized rectangles with glass screens, or
with any screen at all, for that matter, and they
may not even be a single gadget. Brad Barons, the
chief strategy officer for the Center for the Digital Future
at the University of Southern California, predicts that the smartphone

(02:12):
will give way to personal area networks, clusters of tiny
gadgets concealed in beads, in a necklace, or built into
eyeglasses or contact lenses. Such devices will use VR and
a R to project information into our field of vision,
eliminating the need for a screen, And just as we
control apps on today's smartphones by moving our fingers, will
be able to manipulate our next generation personal area networks

(02:34):
through voice commands or by gesturing in the air, perhaps
with the help of haptic technology like that buzz when
you get a text to help sipulate the sensory feedback
of touching actual objects. Typing may not ever become a
completely extinct skill, but it may someday become as rare
as someone who writes an elegant longhand with calligraphy pens.
But increasingly we won't have to input as much information

(02:56):
as we once did. That's because next gen intelligent stants,
imagine a vastly more intuitive version of Siri, Alex or Kirtana,
will learn to figure out what we want to know
or do, sometimes before we realize it ourselves. Aldrich predicts
that in the near future, our personal gadgetry will study
our eye movements in order to make predictions. Staring at

(03:17):
something for two seconds, say, might prompt it to give
us more information about that thing. Barons and visions that
the intelligent assistance of the future will continually whisper in
our ears and project messages that only we can see
that might help us in a lot of ways. If
we encounter a person and can't recall their name, for example,
doctor John Smith might flash before our eyes to remind us.

(03:37):
It's also conceivable that our future devices and intelligent assistance
may interact with other people's digital assistance, possibly taking the
place of some of our interaction with actual people. That's
a prospect that Baron's finds both interesting and disturbing. He
points to current trends like texting instead of calling, or
using apps like Tinder to avoid having to walk up
to that cute person in the bar with no introduction.

(03:59):
Baron said, some of this is good, but it also
means that people can increasingly live in their own little
worlds inside what author Eli Pariser has dubbed filter bubbles,
where you don't need to recognize that there are other
points of view about things. But next generation personal communication
devices may also change us in other ways that we
haven't yet envisioned. As with the smartphone, we'll have to

(04:20):
start using them to find out. Today's episode was written
by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
more on this and lots of other technological topics, visit
our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.