Today three articles landed in my inbox all filled with juicy predictions for the future five, ten and twenty five years. They included the Gartner top ten list, The Next 25 Years in Tech at PC World Magazine and Estimating the Exaflood from The Discovery Institute. Each of them concentrated on technology issues and some definite trends emerged:
Personal Computers will get smaller and smaller (and eventually disappear)
Of course the obligatory Moore’s Law discussion about shrinking hardware was involved but I think the most interesting part of this discussion is the lateral shift away from traditional input devices and data storage. The first trend predicted is that the latest laptop craze will soon transition into pocket-sized devices (aka iPhone-like devices). The biggest hurdle for portable hardware these days seems to be the human factor – the distance from the ear to the mouth is still the limiting factor in phone sizes, and we just can’t seem to make people’s fingers pointy enough for smaller buttons. Alternate interfaces like the iPhone’s touchpad is just the beginning for this trend.
The second part of this larger trend is the movement towards cloud computing and web applications. Stitch Media has had incredible success this year with Amazon Web Services and Google Applications which store data on a third-party server for a subscription fee. This business model seems to fit well with the decentralized workplace, mobile population and constantly upgrading technology needs. We are going to own far less it seems in the future with physically smaller devices and virtual data systems.
We know everything about you
Ambient data – write it down right now so you’ll be ready for it. Geotagging seems to be just the tip of the iceberg for this trend where passive transfer between devices creates such an immense amount of ambient data it’ll make your head spin. With all of these alternative input/output devices lingering in our pockets and talking to each other, the trend seems to be that data mining will be the newest resource economy of this century. Absolutely everything with a battery seems able to report back to some Mothership Connection where everything is stored conveniently for your use (and nobody else ever – don’t be ridiculous you paranoiac). Personal identity may soon be the most important thing in the world.
A new kind of Internet?
“But before we wire our bodies, we need a far more secure network than today’s Internet and better privacy safeguards for the petabytes of consumer data that an always-connected world will generate, says Pradeep Khosla, codirector of CyLab, Carnegie-Mellon University’s computer security think tank.”
Gee, ya think?
According to the Discovery Institute‘s predictions, we are going to be celebrating a new benchmark in 2015 (or sooner) when we hit our first zettabyte of online traffic! (one million million billion bytes – whoa.)
Here are some of the shocking stats they put forward:
“By mid-2007, MSN Video Messenger was already generating 4 PB per month, or as much as the entire Internet in 1997. A move to video-phones would mean 300 exabytes—at least—or 30x the size of the existing U.S. Internet. Cisco’s new HD Telepresence system requires a symmetrical 15 Mbps connection. A one-hour conference call would thus generate around 13.5 GB of data. Just 75 of these Telepresence calls would generate as much traffic as the entire Internet in 1990.”
“By mid-2007, YouTube was streaming around 50 petabytes per month, or 600 petabytes (PB) per year. This was approximately ~7% of all U.S. Internet traffic. For another reference point, consider that all original broadcast and cable TV and radio content totals around 75 PB per year. YouTube streams that much data in 1.5 months. A Hi-Def YouTube would mean 12 exabytes per year, or almost as large as the entire U.S. Internet in 2007. YouTube and its many competitors are still in their infancy.”
“Consumers purchased more than 1 billion mobile phones around the globe in 2006, and they bought even more in 2007. Of these billion phones sold in 2006, more than 400 million were camera phones. And an even larger portion had cameras in 2007. At least 700 million camera phones will be sold in 2009.”
The amount of communication predicted in our near future would explode Alexander Graham Bell‘s head. Of course, he wouldn’t have to say “Come here, I need you” because his always-on device would be transmitting his near-future hi-def Twitter feed to Mr. Watson’s pocket. The interesting meta-trend here is the combination of all three above – centralized computing requires always-on connectivity which allows passive data collection and transfer and will seriously impact the physical infrastructure that this technology relies on.
Third World Luddites
The final prediction for this quick digest is one that PC World gives a really interesting twist. Gartner predicts the price point of 3D printers will inevitably drop and bring the technology into the mainstream consumer. The twist is when consumer-level 3D printers are able to manufacture products instantly and more cheaply than paying someone in the developing world to assemble it. The subtle prediction here is that at some point the products in my home and office will no longer say “Made in China” but will soon say “Made right here, right now by your personal 3D printer”. The overseas manufacturing industry that has relied upon reduced labour costs may find that they are also undercut by locally ‘printed’ goods. It’s a bizarre economic shift that gives a lot of weight to these ‘gimmick 3D printers‘, and its the only one of these predictions that didn’t seem self-evident.
And for now, we wait and get on with our lives today.
