Whats the number of times the letter u appears in:
Once again, it has been a week where it is difficult to decide what present-future I should talk about. If you are a follower of The Lightstream Chronicles, then you know I am trying to write about more than science fiction. The story is indeed a cyberpunk-ish, crime-thriller, drama intended to entertain, but it is also a means of scrutinizing a future where all the problems we imagine that technology will solve often create new ones, subtle ones that end up re-engineering us. Many of these technologies start out a curiosities, entertainments, or diversions that are picked-up by early-adopting technophiles and end up, gradually in the mainstream.
One of these curiosities is the idea of wearable tech. Wristbands watches and other monitors are designed to keep track of what we do, remind us to do something, or now in increasing popularity, remind us not to do something. One company, Chaotic Moon is working on a series of tattoo-like monitors. These are temporary, press-on circuits that use the conductivity of your skin to help them work and transmit. They are called Tech Tats and self-classified as bio-wearables. In addition to their functional properties, they also have an aesthetic objective—a kind of tattoo. Still somewhat primitive (technologically and artistically) they, nevertheless, fall into this category of harmless diversions.
Of course, Chaotic Moon is hoping (watch the video) that they will become progressively more sophisticated, and their popularity will grow from both as both tech and fashion. Perhaps they should be called bio-fashion. If no one has already claimed this, then you saw it here first, folks. If you watch the video from Chaotic Moon you’ll see this promise that these things (in a future iteration) will be used for transactions and should be considered safer than carrying around lots of credit cards. By the way, thieves are already hacking the little chip in your credit card that is supposed to be so much safer than the old non-chipped version. Sorry, I digress.
My brand of design fiction looks at these harmless diversions and asks, “What next?”, and “What if?”. I think most futurists agree that these kinds of implants will eventually move inside the body through simple injections or, in future versions, constructed inside via nanobots. Under my scrutiny, two interesting things are at work here. First there is the idea of wearing and then implanting technology which clearly brings us across a transhuman threshold, and the idea of fashion as the subtle carrier of harmlessness and adoptive lure. You can probably imagine where I’m going with that.
Next up is VR. Virtual reality is something I blog about fairly often. In The Lightstream Chronicles, it has reached a level of sophistication that surpasses game controllers boxes and hardware. You simply dial in your neocortex to the Lightstream, (the future Internet) and you are literally wherever you want to be and doing whatever your imagination can conjure up. In the story, I more or less predict that this total immersion becomes seriously addictive. Check out the prologue episodes to Season 4.
Thanks to one of my students for pointing out this video called the Uncanny Valley.
You can watch it on Vimeo. Chat up the possible idea of any detrimental effects of video games with a gamer and you’ll almost certainly hear the word harmless.
These are the design futures that I think about. What do you think?

user
I found eighty-four "u"s in the provided passage.
assistant