Honestly, it's not an exaggeration to say most of life's issues come down to whether you define the problem correctly.
Let's start with the keyword "superpower."
Humanity has imagined superpowers since ancient and medieval times, and some of those have shown up in novels and movies. So are superpowers, for modern humans, still confined to the realm of imagination the way they used to be?
Personally, I think modern humans have already acquired - and are using - most of the superpowers that were once only imagined. What differs is only the scope of how we define "superpower."
First, we can send telepathy. Through the smartphone. We can fly, and we can meet or duel not in reality but in virtual spaces. We can store time. If, with a certain tool at a certain past moment, we recorded a space-time, we can go back to that past space-time at any time, now or in the future, as many times as we want.
Of course, saying this might prompt "what's that~" but it's not that trivial an issue.
We look at, record, evaluate, and imagine the world through concepts and definitions minted in the era of the carriage. If you're riding in a carriage, you can't imagine a car. We witness that phenomenon in front of us, every day. In public broadcasts, YouTube, and most other media, they say "now is the electric-car era." That very phrasing is an analogy for "a faster, longer-hitched, wider carriage."
It's similar to the old feature-phone vs. smartphone relationship. Those who remember will recall PDAs before smartphones. In practice, they had nearly identical functions to today's smartphones. If you use an Android phone (especially a Windows Phone).. you might say "huh, other than the camera and display, it's almost the same."
Like the PDA that could do Internet or computing, today's electric car - which runs on electric power - is still merely a functional or producer-competition-centric output, like the PDA.
If you're still cracking the whip in a carriage, if you're still driving the car, you can't imagine an OTA-updated vehicle. That's why media still call the electric car "the car of the future."
Imagination always requires current concepts and perceptions. Rather than creating something from nothing, it's a process of editing - combining varieties of existing things to form new dimensions. The closest example is the recently trending deep learning. The perceptron, the basis of deep learning, was actually created back in 1956. But it failed. It was interpreting problems on a 2D (linear) basis. So it was abandoned. But in 1970, reinterpreted through a new lens (2D linear elements recombined and edited to form 3D), it has become the driving force behind the breakthroughs transforming our life today.
As with dimensions: a point makes a line, a line makes a region (2D), and combinations of regions make a space (3D).
Objects largely stay in 3D, while the living beings - including humans - within them live in 4D. Whether that looks like sitting still like a point, moving linearly, or relating multi-dimensionally, depends on how one perceives oneself.
That's why I'm saying humans already realize superpowers. Through 3D tools, a human can project onto another human - forming another 3D - not just their thoughts but their own 3D, beyond the physical boundary of the 3D they live in.
Our imagination should be grounded in the current dimension, but shouldn't be expressed using the concepts or outputs within the current dimension. For instance, the current "drone-car" kind of imagination isn't much different from trying to lift a moving carriage by harnessing hundreds of birds to it.
OK, what are the imaginative outputs facing us? And how should we reinterpret them? Let me quickly run three of the biggest items as a mini case study.
- Giant drone-car -> (error): a Hydra combining today's most efficient drone with "car seating"
-> (redefinition): a means of transport that overcomes x-y axis limits
-> (what if): is human physical movement reasonable and meaningful at all?
- Electric car -> (error): a motor (electric) based vehicle that maximizes interior space and minimizes weight and energy consumption.
-> (redefinition): a vehicle optimized not only in hardware but also in software (networking)
-> (what if): what does it really mean for networking to be optimized?
- Smartphone -> (error): bigger, edge-to-edge screens, higher-spec cameras... and a grotesque fairy-tale solution - "technically" folding the device's own body to solve the physical usability issues that came with it.
-> (redefinition): core is the phone, essence is 'networking'
isn't the essence simply 'human -> (hardware*) -> human'
*and all that's changed is hardware (device - internet - other digital devices)?
-> (what if): Well... is this really the best? For example, what's the biggest difference between an internet portal (Daum, Naver, Yahoo...)
and an ID-based service (Google, KakaoTalk)? The answer's already in the question.
Beyond that, from mega-trends like metaverse, AR/VR, and blockchain to themes like mirror displays and remote work, many candidates are lined up, foot-tapping, hoping to be picked as the next paradigm. Unfortunately, Moore's Law seems to apply to hardware only - not to humans or human perception, not yet.
TMI and a concern: I hope good concepts (past social commerce, the sharing economy, etc.) don't get corrupted by elite-zombies who have lots of money and good credentials but hunger for immediate performance. And even though they're small in scale and don't yet have impressive careers, I'm rooting for the David-like young people young-spirited, who face big issues head-on, with new insight, to reinterpret them!!! That's it for this post.
P.S.
When I titled this "From a faster carriage, to the electric car?", I added the "?" because, actually, OTA vehicles - not EVs - fit future imagination better. The reason I didn't write "OTA" in the title is to account for the semiotic limits a keyword carries.
(In the car category) while we think about tools for moving faster and more comfortably,
(whatever we're thinking about) we should also never forget to ask why we need to {move} and whether {moving} is really the best choice.
