What Makes Us Human?

Human beings are classified as Homo sapiens, which in Latin means "knowing man." Modern Homo sapiens are believed to have appeared a little over 300,000 years ago. The distinction between Homo sapiens and what came before has to do with the relatively sophisticated use of tools―tools that were used to survive more efficiently and with which humans gained control of their surroundings. Tools were also used by early humans to make art on cave walls and carve statuettes of female fertility goddesses. The tools served as augmenting devices―augmenting humans' chances of survival and also of expression.

With modern humans, this augmentation can take the form of education, which in turn is used to gain knowledge. With knowledge, our chances of survival should be better. In many ways, our Prime Directive is to know how to better survive and how to better express ourselves by willfully creating and using tools for those purposes. It is a dual directive, for it cannot be proven that one gives rise to the other, but rather both are mutually beneficial. And it is for both very practical and expressive reasons that tools have continued to be created from the time of early man to today. An example of a human being's ingenuity that traverses both the practical and the expressive are the iterative inventions of the writing "pen and paper" combination. This combination tool, which goes back millennia, started out with cave walls, some form of patchworked dried grasses, as well as stone, serving as the "paper" and natural dye and sturdy reed, as well as a stone or metal chisel, serving as the "pen." "Pen and paper" has been used to record both business and legal matters, as well as nonfictional and fictional narrative, and poetry, as well as visual art, such as paintings, when the "pen" is conceived as pigments. With the advent of the typewriter, there was even more of a separation between the practical and textually expressive and the visually expressive. A machine, the typewriter, was then replaced by the word processor and then the computer. And here we are these days utilizing our computers and their smaller counterparts―the smartphone. Computers did not only replace typewriters; they are also in the process of causing people to question the continued existence of physical books and newspapers, as well as movie theaters.

Our Prime Directive to know how to better survive and how to better express ourselves now has a new channel―Spatial Computing. With Spatial Computing, the uses of the technologies of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence eclipse those of the computer we know today. In the near future, we will no longer have to use a physical computer to do our work and browse the internet. And we will be able to do so much more with the three-dimensionality of Spatial Computing and speech recognition software. It turns out that our need to better express ourselves appears to include a need to experience a replicated reality.

Replicating of reality in the forms of paintings, fiction, and films, as well as other forms, has existed as long as human beings have had the need to express the conditions of both their individual and social existence in an effort to better understand themselves. Experiencing a replicated reality also turns out to be a very good way to achieve a new skill and to get knowledge in general. Spatial Computing is the next generation of imaging that is able to replicate reality, allowing the movement from two-dimensional imaging to three-dimensional. With three-dimensional imaging, the replication of reality is able to be more closely related to the reality it is trying to represent.

Human beings seem to get satisfaction out of presenting and experiencing narratives that have the appearance of being real. An example of this is a movie. It is difficult to say exactly why we get such pleasure out of viewing a "good" movie. Perhaps it is empathy, but the question still remains why empathizing with movie characters that appear to be real should make us feel good, much less entertained. With Spatial Computing, the visuals are even more true-to-life and we are able to move through them (Virtual Reality) or incorporate and manipulate non-real objects into our real world (Augmented Reality). Artificial Intelligence adds another layer to the existing reality by organizing previously unconnected data into meaningful systems that could then be utilized in Spatial Computing to feed our Prime Directive needs.

Photo credit: Robert Scoble. Here, you can see the slums and other residential buildings as seen from the Four Seasons luxury hotel in Mumbai, India. Billions of people live in similar accommodations around the world and they will experience the world far away soon in Spatial Computing devices.