You’ve automated your thinking. What now?

The bicycle, automobile, bus, train, ship, airplane, and spacecraft have enabled humans to project themselves at increasingly longer distances in three-dimensional space. Another way to say that is that we’ve extended ourselves both horizontally and vertically.

Various tools and processes are seeping into our awareness that will contribute to our next great extension: artificial intelligence, chatbots, neural networks, and machine learning to name a few.

Where we go depends on what void needs to be filled and the problems that need to be solved. Will disease and time cease to exist?

Hopefully, these new technologies will create more time for people connect with others and what’s around them. More likely, though, is that it will simply mechanize tasks, jobs, and projects and build linkages between them so that they better coordinate with each other (think internet of things), thereby creating a more effective system for getting things done.

Will we have more time to ourselves? Possibly, but it depends on where we want to go or where we let technology take us.