Intel’s San Francisco conference offered insights on how our future might look like in the next 50 or 100 years. As CEO Justin Rattner pointed out, the gap between humans and machines will become smaller and smaller, and technology will address a lot of issues, including developing sensors that could allow cell phones for example to capture energy from our body heat.

This does not only mean we could use these types of devices for indefinite periods of time, without recharging them, but it would also represent a way of scavenging free energy from the environment, as Rattner pointed out.

In this respect, Rattner presented the concept of Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), which he described as “install-and-forget” kind of systems. The sensors would have to be very tiny, but at the same time, powerful enough to gather information from wireless transmissions, in almost any environment.

Furthermore, they would have uses in health care for example. Rattner explained that if researchers could develop self-powered sensors small enough (molecular level), they could use them to identify health risks in patients, or to monitor a patient’s data and transmit it to a doctor.

Looking ahead, the future could bring anything from machines capable of thinking on their own, to devices that instead of consuming battery, recharge thanks to a resonator-based technology, and even to micro-robots, called catoms, capable of building shape-shifting materials.