So I recent­ly stum­bled upon a kick­starter that not only grabbed my atten­tion but pro­duced all kinds of fan­ci­ful thoughts to enter my mind. We typ­i­cal­ly write about media, but what hap­pens when we head into a future where every­thing is hap­pen­ing with­out our direct phys­i­cal input and our thoughts are caus­ing things to be set into motion. Well it appears to be hap­pen­ing. Dobot is a robot­ic (jobs in robot­ics) arm designed for every­day use which can be con­trolled by a com­put­er, mobile app, ges­ture input (Hap­tics), and even brain waves (EEG). “One of our founder’s exper­tise was in biosen­sors, and thought it’d be cool to con­trol a robot with con­cen­tra­tion” said CEO Jer­ry Liu, “It was not hard to implement.”

I am sor­ry but did you just read that quote?

In the sum­mer of 2014, Liu formed Dobot with the help of his team, five oth­er Shan­dong Uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ates who want­ed to build a cheap, pre­cise robot­ics arm that could be used by hob­by­ists, edu­ca­tors, and indus­try alike. All the mem­bers being for­mer­ly employed at indus­tri­al and med­ical robot­ics com­pa­nies spent the last year build­ing their first mod­el ready pro­to­type Dobot, but to be clear the mak­ers would not set­tle for any­thing less than pre­mi­um accu­ra­cy and construction.

So they basi­cal­ly put up all the devel­op­ment cash from their own pock­ets and then got $150,000 in seed mon­ey to get a sol­id pro­to­type made. On Sep­tem­ber 15 they put up a kick­starter to raise $36,000, well as of right now as I type these words, they have accu­mu­lat­ed $405,294 with 11 days to go. By the time you read this arti­cle the kick­starter should be over so go see what the final num­ber was. So why do you think this has tak­en off, I’ll tell you why, peo­ple hate doing the bor­ing stuff, automa­tion is king, plain and sim­ple. Also you just can’t get that lev­el of con­sis­tent pre­ci­sion with the human hand. I mean come on, how steady can you hold a laser beam? Oh yeah and its open sourced and infi­nite­ly customizable.

If you watch all the videos on the com­pa­ny web­site, you are going to be floored. But here’s where it real­ly threw me for a loop. There is a video scene where a young woman is wear­ing a head­set and is con­trol­ling the device with her men­tal con­cen­tra­tion. Now that is it! This is the cul­mi­na­tion of our tech­nol­o­gy, indus­tri­al­ized men­tal manip­u­la­tion of the phys­i­cal exter­nal world, every­thing inter­act­ing with every­thing via as they like to say the inter­net of things or the Dig­i­tal Noos­phere. Daqri is anoth­er com­pa­ny already tak­ing advan­tage of a dig­i­tal men­tal inter­face, read arti­cle here.

Can you imag­ine every school hav­ing mind-con­trolled robots for learn­ing robot­ics and devel­op­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­gram­ming tech­niques? In 10 years I see a sub­ur­ban back yard event being set up and orga­nized by extend­able robot­ic manip­u­la­tor arms all from men­tal com­mands by a moth­er who is busy in the kitchen per­son­al­iz­ing the cup­cakes for her daughter’s 8^th birth­day par­ty. What about when you walk past a street sen­sor and it reg­is­ters dis­com­fort in your ankle and you get a men­tal noti­fi­ca­tion from CVS that a drone 75 feet above you can deliv­er an Ibupro­fen in 15.7 sec­onds? Hon­est­ly it’s not like Near Field Com­mu­ni­ca­tion isn’t already rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the way adver­tis­ers inter­act with your smart phones, mind read­ing devices could take this to whole new lev­els that adver­tis­ers haven’t even begun to think about.

Adver­tis­ers will be able to inter­act with your mind direct­ly and based on your gen­uine need pro­vide ser­vices. Imag­ine inter­fac­ing with every machine every­where with a thought. I envi­sion see­ing Dobots and much more, doing what we want and exchang­ing ideas about how we do them as the new norm.