The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

Your body is your password. Your digital identity is you. All the tools that VR is exploiting, all the ways it needs to capture your movements, to follow your eyes, to decipher your emotions, to encapsulate you as much as possible so you can be transported into another realm and believe you were there—all these interactions will be unique to you, and therefore proof of you. One of the recurring surprises in the field of biometrics—the science behind the sensors that track your body—is that almost everything that we can measure has a personally unique fingerprint. Your heartbeat is unique. Your gait when you walk is unique. Your typing rhythm on a keyboard is distinctive. What words you use most frequently. How you sit. Your blinks. Of course, your voice. When these are combined, they fuse into a metapattern that almost can’t be faked. Indeed, that’s how we identify people in the real world. If I were to meet you and was asked if we had met before, my subconscious mind would churn through a spectrum of subtle attributes—voice, face, body, style, mannerisms, bearing—before aggregating them into a recognition or not. In the technological world, we’ll come to inspect a person with nearly the same spectrum of metrics. The system will check out a candidate’s attributes. Do the pulse, breathing, heart rate, voice, face, iris, expressions, and dozens of other imperceptible biological signatures match who (or what) they claim? Our interactions will become our password.