When Intel (INTC) commissioned management consulting firm Booz Allen to write a whitepaper on the future of mobile technology, the world’s largest chip maker probably expected information about voice recognition and “predictive” smartphone applications. But the firm’s research goes a step further, suggesting that in the future mobile devices may not need to “hear” our voices or “watch” our movements, because they may connect directly to our brains.
The whitepaper, released to CNN, says that mobile devices will start “melding… directly into the human body” and that the “biological brain will be augmented exponentially.” Its release happened to coincide with Samsung’s launch of its new Galaxy S III smartphone, which Samsung touts as a product that “understands you, (and) share’s what’s in your heart.”
Of course, even today’s blazing quad-core processors (produced by Intel’s competitors) are not yet as fast as the human brain. The report notes that processor speeds need to increase significantly before chips are ready to interact directly with the human brain.
In the United States, it is likely that processors embedded in machines will significantly precede processors embedded in humans. Intel is a major supplier of chips for machine-to-machine applications. The cellular M2M connectivity service market grew at 26.2% in 2011, according to ABI Research. The firm measures the M2M market in cumulative connections, which it now estimates at 110.6 million.
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