22. T E U U ES N E T I
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Editor's Notes
Before I start I ’ d like to thank Elise and all of the volunteers for curating such a wonderful event. Thank you for having me today and thank you all for coming.
I ’ m a little nervous today but not for the typical reasons...sure, there are lots of people staring at me and I ’ m at a TEDx event talking about Zombies of al things...so that in itself is plenty of reason to be nervous. OK, truth be told that does add to it but the thing that has me worried is the fact that I ’ m about to tell you how to survive. There are people around who think that if you ’ re not going to do the prep work yourself then maybe you don ’ t need to survive. When it was announced that I would be here I was warned by friends and colleagues not to give up all of the secrets and I was even threatened. Despite all of the warnings I ’ ve decided to share this with you anyway because it is way too important.
I owe my early adopter status to a neighbor I had when I was growing up in the 80 ’ s. His name was Tom Smith and as John Doe as that sounds the name is real -- I spoke to him while I was preparing this and he knows I ’ m giving him a shout out. Tom was a few years older than me -- he was a young parent at the time and I was a young teenager who lived across the street and occasionally babysat for his kids. He knew I had an interest in technology and without knowing it got me even more excited about it simply by sharing his passions. I bring this up not only to lay a foundation for my stories of future tech but to tell you that if you are passionate about a subject and there are people around who are interested, share your passions with them -- the world still needs dreamers. Back then video games were new and Tom and I both loved playing Atari. He was a graduate student at Hopkins studying computer science and when I would talk to him about how cool video games were he would tell me that it was possible for me to program my own. This blew my mind. These little cartridges seemed like something that people locked in rooms somewhere only had the ability to produce. I couldn ’ t believe that it was something I could do. To me that was the coolest thing. I of course ran home and asked my parents to buy me a new computer but back then they were even more expensive than they are now and didn ’ t do nearly as much. They didn ’ t know much about computers and didn ’ t have the thousands of dollars to plunk down so from that point on whenever I made money babysitting or got a gift of cash for birthdays or Christmas I put it away to save for my own computer. Thankfully it wasn ’ t too long before Commodore came out with the Vic 20 and made it affordable for me. Once I got that thing I never looked back. I was off teaching myself BASIC and making my own games. I can remember having lots of conversations with Tom about all sorts of technology from programming to flat screen TVs. YES! Back in the early 80 ’ s he knew about flat screen TVs that would be as sharp as looking out your window...and they ’ d be thin enough to hang on the wall. I was blown away again...so what do flat screens have to do with Zombies? Nothing. They simply warn about how slow technology can sometimes be reaching the masses...be careful about the tech I ’ m going to share with you today -- be aware that it may not be available when the Zombies come.
All you need to do tune into the local news to hear evidence of it. But don ’ t worry. Those of us in the know, or the apocalypse team, as I call them have been thinking about how to deal with this for a while.
The key to surviving the coming Zombie apocalypse is technology. Not only the technology we have today but technology of the fututre. So what ’ s a flying car doing up here? Well, whenever I think of the future I always think of flying cars. Beyond my own silly disappointment that they don ’ t exist, I think they ’ d be a great way to get around when the Zombies come. You can expect roads and passages to be blocked with ruin, stalled cars, and various devastation, so having a flying car would be a good solution around. Now, I ’ m not here to talk to you about what might be I ’ m here to talk about technology that is here or coming very soon, and there are some people working on bring us machines like this, such as: bla bla bla.
Flying cars are good if you need to move several people around but there may be a need to head out on your own for a quick mission here or there and one way to do that without drawing as much attention might be to use a Jet Pack.
Here you can stock up on supplies, food, and weapons.
Wireless networks often go down during disasters, but they also can come back online (at least in spots) before power has been restored to buildings. Sometimes, voice service goes down, but text messages will still work. (During Hurricane Katrina, text messaging saved lives and was a key coordination tool, according to Online Journalism Review.)
Cell phone are great for giving us access to lots of data while on the go but when Zombies are chasing you it’s not always convenient or easy to look down at your phone and while voice controls are great if you’re out of breath from running you may not easily be able to access Siri or have it understand what you’re talking about. Glass will be able to fill us in about our environment during those times—giving us acces to information about the whereabouts of our friends and the zombies.
Of course if we plan to use technology to stay ahead of the zombies we’ll need a way to power up all of our devices. While I hope that smart power grids will stay online, you may run into situations where you need an alternative source. Solar energy, could provide us with all the power we need.
This is a two-door diesel-electric car with a fuel efficiency of 63 mpg and a zero to 60 time of only 4.8 seconds. There are a number of innovations such as the layering construction technology, aluminum chassis and suspension, special polycarbonate glasses, lithium-polymer cells and a 3D Head Up Display.
Lightweight, heads up display, full-view windows, aerodynamic and efficient. Everything you need to escape from the zombies.
Low maintenance, light weight, has hidden brakes, computer sensors on board and a speed foil. Plus there ’ s speed storage: Take your tools, flat fixes, and energy bars with you.
Pranav Mistry of MIT Labs has come up with something he calls 'SixthSense'. It is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
Of course if you ’ re on your bike you can project onto a small flat surface mounted in the front of the bike -- you ’ ll want to leave your hands free for steering.
Like Google Glass it is also aware of the world around us.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going…but only the wily will survive the zombies. You should have stocked up heavily on bullets while you were at the big box stores.
I know that hearing all of this doom and gloom may be hard but here is the good news. What ever the problems of the future, Zombie Apocalypse or something else, the technology is there for us to invent our way out of there.
