Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Four more years of change.

It’s a tough job being a futurologist. When you make predictions, people often dismiss them as unrealistic, asserting that society won’t change that fast. It is common for people to claim that with all the grand hype of the early 90s, nothing has changed since then. Of course, they are either blind or stupid. Looking back even four years, 3G was a distant dream, now it’s here. Half of you still didn’t own a mobile phone. Hardly anyone had a DVD player, let alone rewritable DVD or a digital video recorder. Few had MP3 players, digital cameras, Sony’s AIBO or anything with Bluetooth in it, let alone a GPS navigation system. Wireless LANs were very rare. Photo phones, video phones, Blackberries, USB memory sticks, Firewire, I could go on and on. Lots has changed. All the above are now commonplace. There is little merit in saying I told you so, but just for the record, I did. Hecklers still make the same casual dismissals of today’s predictions. A tough job indeed. But boy is it exciting!

The next four years will be just as exciting. Some stuff is pretty obvious. We’ll have thousands of new gadgets with different combinations of computing, consumer electronics and communications, with very different designs. Some will descend from palmtop computers, some from telephones, some from media players, but mostly their parentage won’t be so obvious. They’ll easily handle audio, video, internet, comms, navigation and processing, with cameras and massive storage built in and not a wire in sight.

Putting this into a single picture, we something like the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It will probably be powered by fuel cells and combine almost all the functions of today’s gadgets and more. Other obvious developments are larger, flatter screens, faster and better computers, and the virtual disappearance of the video cassette and film cameras.

Some stuff is less obvious. For example, networks are already fiercely competing to provide links between these gadgets. As well as mobile networks, ultra-fast wireless LANs are being deployed anywhere there is a reasonable density of people, some commercial, some private. Soon we’ll see lots of ad hoc networks, set up by our gadgets themselves, self-organising to provide networks right across town. These will link via wireless LANs to fixed networks. We will often access the net, and text and chat to our friends for free, especially since most friends live locally. Exactly how far this goes in four years depends on the business plans of the wireless LAN providers, but with lots of spare capacity on many corporate nets, and easy ways of using these sponsored nets for marketing, this is all too feasible to dismiss.

Small, smart displays will be used for body adornment soon, first as loose video jewellery, then probably stick-on video patches. On the street, some of these devices will act as tribal symbols, holding groups of young people together with constant instant messaging and letting people keep close track of their friends. By measuring skin resistance, temperature and nerve signals, they will get clues to our emotions and the jewellery will respond accordingly. Night clubbers will welcome personality badges that automatically introduce them to people who are compatible, available and willing. For socially challenged IT managers and programmers, this will be a godsend.

Some of the most impressive change will be invisible One such field is pervasive ICT, or PICT. We’ll start seeing barcodes being replaced by radio-frequency identity tags, adding exciting net based functionality to packaging for just a few pence. High value perishable items such as meats will sport sensor chips that warn us when the contents start going off. Tags and sensors (and processors later on) will appear in every corner of our environment and every aspect of our lives. PICT will enable new concepts such as virtual air, where we map cyberspace functionality onto points in space, displayed on head-up displays that are likely to start catching on soon. Street cyberspace overlays an IT world on the real world, opening up huge new business and social opportunities. We’ll see buildings with dual appearance, one for the real world and one for the augmented reality overlay. Computer games will extend into physical space instead of being confined to our computers. Social groups will leave messages or warnings at particular points on the street for their friends and their rivals. Inevitably we’ll have much more surveillance too.

Outside of IT, we will see impressive strides in biotech and nanotech, with many more firsts in genetic engineering. It will be increasingly obvious that life-spans are going to increase a lot, making today’s pension crisis look like a storm in a teacup. If young people take notice, we’ll see the growth of the inter-generation rift as the young realise who it is that will have to pay. They will take notice, soon, and they’ll use the net to maximise their impact. But generation Y is already further away from their expected death date than when they were born. No-one has dared think yet about the economic consequences from the fact that before their bodies die, they’ll be able to download into an android replica. The pensions crisis will become very deep indeed.

So some of this new technology will push against ethical boundaries, taking us into new territory, and forcing us to make decisions we’ve never had to make before. Human cloning, customised pets, routine genetic selection for children are all likely to be much bigger issues in four years as the technology brings them closer or even achieves them. People won’t always like the impacts, and we are likely to see a backlash against some developments, such as surveillance technology, as video cameras become ever smaller and cheaper and more cases of abuse hit the media. The content industry war with its customers will also have lots of casualties.

One of the consequences of this technology explosion is vast choice, with a huge range of different gadgets to pick from. With the base technologies mostly commoditised, many companies will be competing for a slice of each market. This brings two problems. Firstly, the continuation of standards wars. Secondly and more importantly, people don’t handle choice well. Most of us already suffer from choice stress, terrified of wasting our money or looking uncool. Fashion will become tremendously important in determining market success for new technologies, simply because there will be so much choice and fashion tells people what to buy. Stars will be paid even larger sums to make us want a particular brand or gadget as the stakes grow. Some stars will be lifestyle gurus, telling us which items to buy if we have a certain lifestyle, and their endorsement may appear as yet another logo on products, just like the little vegetarian symbols we see on food products.

One of the most important movements today is in open source software (such as Linux). In four years it is likely to be much more accepted as a real alternative to the commercial giants. It also has a strong symbiotic relationship with the web community, which is also growing fast. One result of this is that with no need to add extra functionality just to sell yet another upgrade, we may see a strong ‘back to basics’ trend in both hardware and software. Most people want robust, easy to use software that does just what we need at low cost, and not a million things more that help little, but compromise security and reliability. The market will provide. Software will start to become simpler, with extra functionality available via the net when we really need it. For those of us sick of long boot times, constant patch downloads, frequent security scares and software that crashes every five minutes, this will be very welcome indeed. If all other technology fails to arrive, this alone will make the next four years worthwhile.

So, lot’s of change ahead then, some good, some bad. If this all sounds too much like wild speculation, just remember that the stuff we have now sounded just as wild four years ago. Four years is a long time in technology. Argue if you like, but I’ll still get to say I told you so again.

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