iPhone 4, Augmenting Humanity

by Bill French on 05/10/10 at 5:00 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

I’ve written elsewhere that my first-gen iPhone was the first smart-phone I didn’t want to smash into a million bits six months after getting it. It’s difficult to remember the not-too-distend past when smart phone browsers sucked, connectivity was

fleeting, and integration with documents, people, and social interaction was difficult if not impossible.

Times have changed, and new ideas are beginning to shape our future mobile landscape beyond our wildest notions just three years since iPhone was introduced. In this short time-span the world has decided that mobile computing, not just communications, are key issues in the human perspective.

Indeed, iPhone has augmented all of humanity because it has set the bar so high in terms

of mobile computing expectations. This term – “augmenting humanity” was recently coined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Schmidt also mentioned the idea that Google could perhaps function as a “serendipity engine,” an self-guided application that perhaps could search for important information without you even typing a query. I wrote about this in 2005 – my peers thought I was insane.

Schmidt commented,

“I’m interested in history, as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco I want my mobile device to tell me about the history here, think of it as a serendipity engine,”

Information should find you, not the other way around. Ideally, it should find you at exactly the moment and place in time when that information is of greatest value. At a technology level, this is possible today with iPhone and iOS’s rich array of push and notification frameworks.

Schmidt continued …

“what we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”

What are your thoughts? Has iPhone played a pivotal role in advancing humanity? Is Google on the right axis such that it will leverage advanced mobile technologies to humanity’s benefit?

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