No more real friends?
Over the next two months, industrial design students of The Hague University of Applied Sciences will develop future scenario’s as part of their course on scenario-planning. This week, two groups came to STT. Each of the two groups will focus on a specific aspect of human interactions in their scenario’s. Both groups were very keen to learn more about the STT-project “The human being in 2050”.
Discussing pros and cons
STT-project leader Ellen Willemse introduced some of the technologies that will be looked at in that project. After the introduction, it was time for a first go at imagining future scenario’s and discussing their pros and cons. One of the conclusions from the discussion is that people expect that in the future, it will be completely normal to meet your friends virtually most of the time, whether that is through holographic presence, enhanced reality applications, or virtual reality tools that provide both visual and physical feedback. Both with friends that live on the other side of the world and those that live nearby.
A system as your friend
Once self-learning systems were added to the scenario, having a system as a friend became very thinkable. Yet, most students said they prefer to interact with real people. The argument being that some criticism or other forms of not-so-nice interaction is appreciated after all. But what if self-learning systems learn this and adapt? Could a system be a real friend?
More ideas
These and more ideas will be explored over the next few weeks. In December, preliminary results will be presented to STT. The final results will follow in January and will be used as input for the STT-project.