A Computer That Can Smell? Feel Touch Through Your Phone? A Reality in Five Years, Say Experts

Pretty soon, there won't be any need for sci-fi movies!  We'll already have the technology in use.

According to researchers at IBM,  here are five astounding features that phones and computers will have by 2018:

1. Computers with a sense of smell.
2. Computers will know what you like to eat better than you do!
3. Computers will be able to hear what matters.
4. Computers will not only be able to look at images, but understand them.
5. In five years you will be able to touch through your phone.

We're not sure what the immediate purpose of a computer than can smell would be, except perhaps for smoke or chemical detections similar to smoke alarms. Touching through your phone could be interesting, but the one that creeps us out the most is a computer than is capable of understanding.   Anyone remember SkyNet?  The computer defense system in the Terminator movies that began to 'learn at a geometric rate' and became self-aware.

When they tried to pull the plug, boom!   Ok, maybe a computer understanding images isn't that sophisticated, but the idea that a computer could be capable of comprehension instead of just running programs on data it is given is a little weird.

Of course, who could have predicted the smart phone less than a decade ago?