Besides processing power, price and battery life improvements, our preferences for gadgets and the direction of those desires point towards three things: Richer displays, more seamless inputs and smaller packages—the first two being in direct conflict with the last. Looking at where we've been and where we are, I don't think we can keep pursuing these goals without going gadget prosthetic.

Now here's a trip: For the first time, this decade, design choices are being made to limit resolution in screens to show mercy to the human eye. Apple's recent iMac revision increased the desktop monitor's pixels per inch rating to about 110. That's the equivalent of a laptop levels of density, but on a big 27-inch screen, and it was so sharp, it hurt. Any desk jockey can tell you that as displays get sharper, the strain goes up. On mobiles, which are already the most pixel dense of the gadget kingdom, designers are frequently bashing into conflicting goals of fitting lots of pixels onto pocketable devices. Resolution-independent operating systems (that rely on vector-based graphics) are important but if we don't take displays inside the human body, gadgets can't get much smaller—there's no way for them to become as pixel rich as desktops while continuing to get smaller than they already are.

The the idea for hybridized HUDs featuring reality and computed interfaces has been around for ages. Science fiction has already dreamed up what it is we want to see in animations like Ghost in the Shell. But the recent explosion of augmented reality apps—powered by smartphones with directional compasses, internet connections, location awareness, cameras and the power to draw data driven overlays—are simply prototypes for real HUD and in-eye/mind displays. It's not a conceptual problem as much as it is a question of how.

Keyboards and buttons are easier to understand as a limitation, as we type on increasingly baby-finger sized keyboards on smartphones with appendages that look like hot dogs. Keyboards just need to go away. Towards that trend, software keyboards may be error prone but when used by the proficient, the typing is way faster and the devices are way smaller. Further away from traditional keyboards, Microsoft Research's projects point towards gesture and voice commands. I don't see how we could get full work days done that way, though, and there's the rub. There's not even a good concept for controlling a PC to the level we need to without keyboards and pointers now. Mind control is a joke.

In user-interface design, we've always trended towards the invisible. Instead of seams, we want the seamless. Instead of four clicks, any given major task is better with three. Maybe one day, none—the blink of an eye. Funny enough, the only mentally controlled gadgets these days are toys. And usually the low-end QVC valley where high-end tech ends up after dripping down from the peak of military or space program development to gadget fiends, and finally their kids. I would guess the sloppy capabilities of such toys, like the Mindflex Brainwave, make it inappropriate, unsafe and unusable for anything but hovering a ball in mid air.

It's funny looking back at attempts of strap-on computing. We always thought these clunky setups—"wearable" PCs velcro'd to our arms or slung over our backs—were the predecessors to in-body computing. I've long assumed that getting to prosthetic gadgets was an issue of micronization. "When we can fit a computer into the profile of a Bluetooth headset, people will use 'em," we thought. But it's clear to me that it's about the interface; the inputs and outputs.

Gadgets don't have much more room for revolutionary improvement unless we bypass our own natural limitations of fingers meant to peel bananas and eyes designed to spot prey and predators, and get these damn things we love and depend on so much routed directly into our brains.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

[Image from Stuart Moore]

Transhumanists believe so, and contemplate how technology might be used to enhance our mental and physical capacities.

H+ Magazine has round up some leading minds, and steered their thoughts towards sex. Will it still exist as we know it today?

Sex for procreation will be separated from sex for pleasure. Polyamorism will be the norm. After all if "I" have uploaded, duplicated myself and exist as self-similar copies in cyberspaces co-existent with realspace, where does the "self" end and the "other" begin? —Extropia DaSilva

Exosex, sex outside the biological body, would be simulated in virtuality, much like Second Life or Skype and other digital formats where sex is enhanced, extended, digitized, and synthetic. It would be more real than real - a hyper-real experience. —Natasha Vita-More

Woah. More trippy concepts for your Wednesday morning after the jump. Not exactly safe for work, though. [H+ Magazine via Fleshbot NSFW]

At the conference, the scientists debated research limits on AI, much like their colleagues in genetics and biotechnology have done already with stems cells. Their thoughts were published this weekend under an ominous, dark cloud headline at the New York Times: "Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man"

The location is actually an interesting bit of trivia, as Asilomar was host to a groundbreaking conference on genetics and biology in 1975. At that conference, scientists met to debate their new found ability to reshape life at the cellular level. As the Times notes, the conference ultimately led to guidelines for "recombinant DNA research" and a Nobel Prize for organizer Paul Berg.

Today's scientists are hoping to get similar guidelines into place for AI, although many worried openly that autonomous people-killing robots were here already.

But for every cautionary tale out of Asilomar these days, there's a detractor ready to debunk the warnings with a bit of what they believe to be common sense. Said startup guru and investor Chris Dixon (via Gawker's own Nick Denton, no less), "Is the nytimes serious? AI researchers I know are embarrassed by the lack of progress, not worried about too much."

Indeed, when Wilson chatted with Wired for War author PW Singer during our ominous Machines Behaving Deadly theme week, we learned that a Terminator uprising was unlikely to happen anytime soon because the "preconditions" simply weren't in place—yet.

"The Global Hawk drone may be able to take off on its own, fly on its own, but it still needs someone to put that gasoline in there," he said. Nevertheless, as Wilson added after that comment, "it's not hard to see how this precondition could eventually be overcome." No kidding.

Many of the details from this conference are still coming out, but from what we read today one could definitely infer that there was an ominous, cautious tone present throughout the proceedings. "I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions," said Tom Mitchell, a professor of AI and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University. "[But] the meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives."

Sounds like a split decision. Who's afraid of some big bad AI now? [New York Times]

Spotted initially by CrunchGear, the movie links to a web site called What's In The Box, but the trail pretty much ends there. They don't have any ideas either.

If anything, it's just a cool short film that successfully combines gadgets, sci-fi and film making into a nice little package. That it apparently doesn't have any point whatsoever, and ends somewhat abruptly with a "singularity," well, that's another thing. For now, enjoy this on a lazy Sunday. [CrunchGear]

Nice response so far guys, but we have a few notes about the entries we've been receiving:

Some of you have done great, but most of you are just sending yourselves in a robot costume from 2003. No offense, but we do not care about your old pictures from when you still listened to Nelly.

We want pictures in which you, as a robot, are turning on Man (read: not just hanging out with Him). Think less robots dancing by a keg and more robots stealing a keg with a mob of angry humans chasing behind. Capture the moment of singularity. Capture our downfall.

And in case you've forgotten the grand prize, one of you will win a whole pizza. Now, I know a lot of you read that and think we mean a large. Well, we do not mean a large. We're talking about an extra large. Feed yourself and someone you love.

The only catches are that all submissions must be:

1. Original Non-Photoshopped Photos
2. Received by November 1st

Send all of your best shots to tips@giz with the headline "Robots Turn on Humans" for entry, along with your contact info. May the meanest robot win. [Photo by Steve Madonna]

Says SD Times:

Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

Sure, it's a possibility that this could just be a technology that will be integrated into a more conventional desktop-based Windows successor, or that Midori will stay in the Research wing like many Microsoft projects tend to do. But with so many industry players jumping into cloud computing (and with the Microsoft lifers involved in Midori "going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days," according to a previous rumor), the chances for something more ambitious are interesting to consider. [SD Times via The Register]

According to Microsoft 2.0:

“There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.

“What’s also interesting about Midori is who is running the project. One-time Gates heir-apparent Eric Rudder is heading up the effort. Midori is being incubated under Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s wing. ‘Everyone under him (under Rudder on Midori) is a multi-year vet, has a super fancy title, and is going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days,’ one Microsoft tipster told me.

“When and how Microsoft will roll out Midori is still a mystery. But it sounds like the company thinks the project is serious enough to dedicate a considerable amount of time/people/resources to it.”

So it won't be in Windows 7, but from the sounds of it, Midori might be far enough along to make it to Windows 8. Will they still keep calling it Windows to hold onto the brand, or will they call it something different to illustrate how dramatically separate it is from what we're currently using? [ZDNet]

The concept is still in its infancy, as evidenced by the five to 10 minutes it takes just to write a typical sentence. It's also difficult to place those electrodes on the skull—it reportedly takes an hour to place all 128 in just the right spot. But the scientists are working on that, too, where they re developing a contactless cap it will take the place of all those cumbersome electrodes.

The software learns along with its user, letting disabled people think their thoughts onto a computer screen, seemingly through telepathy. Sounds like a first step on the way to Ray Kurzweil's Singularity.

Brain-controlled device could help the disabled [Mail & Guardian]

I don't know how to figure it out, but it seems to me that stimulating a human brain such as my own would be a good place to start.

A major step toward a Kurzweil/Vinge "singularity," extropian future, where the human brain is reverse-engineered and combined with computer technology, or lacking only eggs to complete a delicious southern breakfast?

Big Brain Thinking [MIT Technology Review]