Deus Ex Machina

Why The Device Of The Future Is A Gateway

Abhishek Kothari
7 min readFeb 22, 2019
Esther Jiao on Unsplash

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.” —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Abraham Maslow’s need hierarchy theory is a neat, compact and mostly reliable way of looking at human needs. We have been using technology to help solve our basic needs such as finding food (Yelp!), clothing (Amazon and online retailers), shelter (AirBnB) and mobility (Uber) so far. There is no restriction to us using technology to solver higher level needs such as love and belonging, self-esteem and ultimately self-actualization.

What we see today is a plethora of devices in the market much like the oceans of humans seeking the ultimate truth. I have no doubt that the purpose of the device of the future is singular. If it was an objective function, the purpose of every device would be to maximize the amount of time, that the human species has on this planet, for a higher order pursuit. That pursuit is self-actualization leading to liberation of the soul.

This story lays out the reasons why the device of the future will be a gateway/portal to an

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Abhishek Kothari

Futurist@The Intersection of Finance, Tech & Humanity. Stories of a Global Language: “Money”. Contributor @ Startup Grind, HackerNoon, HBR