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Friday 10, 2020. Many people will wake up to the alarm clock, listen to the latest news as they get their breakfast ready, drive to work and put in a good 8 to 10 hours in either front of their computer, serving customers or in long, drawn out meetings. They will then drive home to their families, have dinner, get their kids ready for bed, surf the Net, and relax in front of the TV. Later on, a few brave souls may head down to the pub for a drink before they finally call it a day.
This is likely to be the most accurate prediction you can make about life ten years from now. In other words, 2020 will be pretty much the same as it is today*. If we look back to the turn of the Millennium, many of us had mobile phones, Internet access, TV dinners, recycling bins and telephone conferencing. The world is as it was then, with the addition of a few new gadgets, a better Internet experience, text messaging and wireless broadband. The world today is 2000 with more toys, in other words. Most change, when it comes to the inexorable rise of technology in our lifestyles, comes along slowly. When making predictions about everyday life in the next 10 years, it is imperative that we keep this glacially slow pace of technology adoption in mind. Many of the changes that will made the difference in ten year time are probably already around us in one form or another, but it will take most of the decade to make them widespread.
But life will not stay still, so here are my guesses as to the big changes over the next ten years.
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Internet everywhere.
By 2020 most gadgets you will buy – TV’s, radios, music centres, cars, cameras, domestic appliances and many children’s toys – will be Internet enabled in one form or another. Bandwidth will have improved greatly and most content will be in the “cloud”, i.e. stored and managed remotely. Connectivity will be wireless and largely invisible to the user. Most of the stuff we watch and listen to: videos, music, TV programmes, etc. will be downloaded digitally and instantaneously.
It’s likely that the Internet will also have changed. While it will more ubiquitous, it will also be more subtle. The central access point to the Internet – the web browser – will still be there, but there will be multiple other ways of interacting with the Net. The Internet will be centrally involved in feeding multiple different applications and devices, presenting information relevant to the experience expected from those technologies. Doing business on the Internet will not be as simple as getting a web-page together, as customers will expect information in a variety of different ways.
A new way to shop.
I think RFID – Radio Frequency ID tags – will come into their own in the next decade. Bar codes will disappear, to be replaced by tags that will identify themselves wirelessly at the checkout. With this, supermarkets will change dramatically. You simply pick what you want, put it into a trolley, pass a radio scanner and instantly collect the receipt. No more checkouts, no more queues. Just pick, pay and pack. This technology has been around for ages, but it remains expensive for widespread retail use. We should expect this barrier to be overcome in the next few years, resulting in a transformation of the shopping experience.
The rise and rise of Touch
One of the coolest technologies to gain prominence in the last decade has been touch sensitive surfaces. So far, the smartphone is the greatest beneficiary of this technology but we should expect it to expand rapidly beyond these bounds before the decade is out. The real benefit of touch technology is that it makes more use of limited or wasted “real estate” within any hardware product. With Touch, the keyboard becomes a writing or drawing pad, while enclosures begin to resemble skin (think of the applications for kids toys).
Electric cars
I expect that the next decade will be a big one for green technology generally and for electric cars in particular. There will be a noticeable transition from petrol to electricity, probably towards the end of the decade once the infrastructure becomes more commonplace. Some governments (Israel and Denmark, for example) have already committed funds to a suitable infrastructure, carbon credits already in force in many countries will make electric cars an increasingly attractive proposition and car manufacturers are beginning to roll out new electric cars. This could be the most noticeable achievement of the Teen decade.
Space travel
For some, this might be the lost decade for space travel. The Space Shuttles are to be moth-balled later this year and the world will need to wait five to seven years before NASA is ready to launch replacement craft. However more countries than the USA are capable of throwing large payloads into space, so progress will continue steadily throughout the next ten years with the Chinese and Indians joining the space race in earnest. An area to watch closely is private space travel. I don’t foresee mass transportation on private space vehicles this decade, but the 2020’s are a different story. It’s entirely feasible that people will routinely travel from London to Beijing in less than an hour aboard hypersonic jets skimming above the atmosphere. As for the Moon and Mars? We need a few decades more.
Geno and Nano
I’m going to stick my head well inside my shell and opine that the next decade will not be the decade where we see designer babies, gray goo or a clone slave underclass appear. There will be progress – lots and lots of progress – but regulatory issues and public pressure might significantly delay mainstream adoption. Where I do see progress is in medicine. I think that there are going to be some big breakthroughs in the treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. We should also see big advances in the growing and transplanting of replacement tissues from stem cells and some modest yet important improvements in cancer therapies.
The black swans
In 1960, few would have predicted that men would be walking on the Moon by the end of the decade. In 1990, mention of the Internet would have been met with blank stares from most people. It’s likely that, sometime during the next ten years, new inventions that none of us are thinking about will capture our imagination and dominate public discourse. Like any new technology, the hype will greatly exceed any immediate benefits, but whatever the effect, it is likely that we will be much more concerned about these in 2020 in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are today.
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So, these are a sample of my predictions for the next decade. Will they come true? Well, at the very least, it will be fun to open up my Internet reader on Friday 10th 2020 and guffaw at my naive speculations from ten years before. What do you think? Am I missing something obvious that you believe will be huge in the next decade?
* Apocalyptic predictions not withstanding..
(Photo by SanFranAnnie)
The table quiz is under threat. For many years, table quizzes (or pub quizzes) have been a terrific way to raise funds for good causes. However the format needs an urgent rethink, otherwise this source of evening enjoyment will die very quickly. The immediate reason? Cheating. The root cause? Google and Smartphones.
If you are not from Ireland or the UK, you may be unfamiliar with table quizzes, so here’s the skinny. A large group of participants meet together in a pub. They are split into teams of four people. A quiz master reads out a series of questions that the teams must answer in a short period of time, 2 to 3 minutes usually. Usually the questions are batched together in rounds – maybe 5 questions at a time so that the teams can get an indication of how well (or how badly) they are doing. There are typically 10 rounds overall. The team that gets the most answers right wins. It’s good fun – a combination of teamwork, competitiveness and perplexing problems to while away many a dark Irish winter (or summer) evening.
Enter the smartphone. Smartphones make it pretty easy to cheat. Just log on to Google over a mobile network – ask your question, and the answer will be shown to you within seconds. It’s quick, it’s covert, and it gives those who possess an iPhone or comparable device a huge advantage over less technologically savvy (or more scrupulous and honest) teams.
Almost any what, who, why, where and how question can be answered immediately through a Google search, but it doesn’t stop there. Google translates into multiple languages, it performs simple arithmetic, it can give you synonyms and dictionary definitions, unit conversions and it will tell you what happened on a particular date in time. Most table quiz questions should be answerable in less than half a minute through a quick search of the Internet.
Yes, yes. Quizmasters will ask that mobile phones are not used, but it’s increasingly unlikely that such requests can be effectively enforced, particularly if you have a large group involved. Access to the mobile internet is extremely easy these days. It’s better instead that quizmasters adapt their questions to the new reality.
Here are a few ideas that will help to limit the power of smartphones in table quizzes.
1) Use more picture questions. Picture rounds are already a staple of most table quizzes, but it becomes more important when hidden smartphones are being used. While words and descriptions can be easily googled, photographs of faces, objects and places are less easy to look up (for the time being).
2) Use more audio soundbites. Again, sounds are common in table quizzes, and again they are difficult to google. Be aware though! Music, particularly if it is played for a long period of time, can be identified using applications like Shazam. Also be aware that common soundbites, like “One small step for man”, or “I have a dream” can be easily googled. You need to keep your soundbites relatively difficult to uncover, so that people have to concentrate on the sound and the voice, rather than the content. Also consider non-human sounds, such as birds, animals or machinery.
3) Get them to solve puzzles. Examples include:
- Odd One Out. Give people three or four names or words and ask for them to identify the odd one out. Yes, people can google for more information, but the chances are that they will soon run out of time. It’s one of those things that you either get immediately, or you will have difficulty resolving.
- Complete the sequence. Try some simple sequences, based perhaps on simple formulas or less obvious sequences like [7,4,1,8,5,2]*. . Just make sure that your sequence isn’t too obvious! Offset it by a fixed number perhaps. For instance [2, 4, 8, 16, 32..] is pretty obvious, but [5,7,11,19,35..] is less clear, even though it’s the same sequence offset by 3.
- Maths problems – Yes, the ones we were subjected to when we were yinglings. Jim has 70 squaggles. Each squaggle is composed of 13 mirdles. Jim gives 10 squaggles to Bill who only wants 25 mirdles and who gives 3/5 of the remainder to Bob. How many mirdles does Bob have? It’s simple algebra but it will drive the smartphone cheats crazy.
- Lateral Thinking Problems. These are the type of stories that have a very easy answer if you question your assumptions. For instance “A man who was not wearing a parachute jumped out of a plane. He landed on hard ground and yet was unhurt. Why?” (OK, that one was easy, but more difficult questions are available in books such as this one, and will keep the audience thinking)
4) Go Local. Although general knowledge is likely to be prominently displayed on the Internet, often local knowledge is more patchy. What is the name of the pub on the corner of Main St and High St? Who is the former principal of the local school? What club won the local athletics contest in 2005? Just check that such information is not already available on Google or Wikipedia before setting questions.
5) Rapid-fire rounds. Give people more questions than they could possibly handle in a short period of time. Ask 20 or 30 questions in a single round. (It can be provided to them on a piece of paper). Yes, people could use a smartphone to answer the questions, but the entry of the questions alone will lose them time. This will put them at a disadvantage compared to more knowledgeable teams.
6) Individual rounds. Nominate a member of each team to walk up to the platform and answer a series of questions in full view of the audience. Not so easy to use a smartphone when every other team is looking at you!
Can you think of any other ways to keep Google out of the table quiz? Let me know!
* By the way, how did you get on with this sequence?
In the last few years, some delightful technologies have become available to consumers, driving a new boom in electronics sales. These technologies include touch-screen, wireless Internet, accelerometers and global positioning systems to mention the key ones. I happen to be writing this blog entry on a device that has all of these and more.
But what is next? Have we reached some sort of technological pinnacle now? I think not.
I’m eagerly awaiting one big technology to arrive soon. Proximity sensing.
I’m slightly myopic, but most people don’t realize this. They never see me with glasses on. The mundane reason is that I have an amazing propensity to lose glasses. Most glasses I have ever had take their leave from me after a few months, with the last set disappearing forever on a plane back from the US. What I would love is a device that monitors their position and alerts me if they are no longer in my immediate viscinity.
I can conceive of other applications immediately. Finding golf-balls when they get lost in the rough. Keeping tags on errant toddlers or pets. Finding the car in the car park. Maybe even finding partners to all the odd socks in the house..
The key to such a technology is a thingy known as a RFID tag. It’s a small transmitter that can be attached to any object, so that its location can be determined by an appropriate detection device.
RFID’s are still somewhat expensive, which explains why we don’t see them in the shops just yet. They are already being used in certain specialist industries and their size and cost is reducing yearly. I can concieve a time, however, when rolls of tiny, machine washable or transparent RFIDs will be bought in shops for just a few pence each, or that they will already be embedded in most items bought in the shops.
The detection devices are also relatively straightforward, using simple triangulation to pinpoint objects. Indeed a small pocket device such as a mobile phone should be more than adequate to find missing things quicky.
Add in some some software to determine specific rules, associate items to the tags and enable specific applications and those missing socks will be a thing of the past.
I’ve just noticed that if you type a phrase such as this into a Google search bar :-
convert 189.54 euro into GBP
it comes back with an answer for you straight away.
Pretty handy for an international jet setter like me, I would say.
Now here is something I definitely didn’t have when I was a kid: YouTube Mobile.
A couple of nights ago, I was reading a book on Space to the kids. Up came a pop-up Space Shuttle (which one of the twins attempted to rip before I quickly averted his hand). We then had a discussion on the Space Shuttle and then I took out my iPhone, logged on to YouTube and showed them a space shuttle launch for real.
Their jaws dropped.
In the last few nights we have discovered the ISS, Pyroclastic Flows, the Moon landings and Tyrannosaurus Rex and sun spots all from the safety of their bunk-beds.
Then a few nights later I was reading my eldest son a book on Mexico. We came to a page where the voladores swing around a high pole on a rope tied to their legs. Out comes the iPhone, YouTube is called up and in seconds we are seeing it happening on video.
He yawned and muttered something like “whatever” under his breath…
Anyway, moody 9 year olds aside, I think it’s really cool.
I’m like a little kid at the moment. I’ve just recieved an iPhone and I have been busy over the last two days tinkering around with it. It’s an incredible little box of tricks.
The basic features of the phone are excellent, what with touchscreen and GPS and the Accellerometer etc.. However, what makes the phone really stand out are the huge number of apps that can be downloaded for it. I have downloaded a few games, installed planetarium software, turned it into a remote control, and I am writing this posting from the new WordPress app despite the fact that I have no connection to the Internet.
And no, I haven’t yet made a phone call with it…
Our recently departed* finance Minister is causing a stir in Brussels by wishing to change the definition of copyright from an economic incentive into a welfare system for musicians. Techdirt doesn’t pull any punches, calling it “a total and complete bastardization of copyright law”. (There are echoes of the Spatial Strategy and Decentralisation here, methinks).
In addition, he supports the implementation of a levy on various recording devices, so that you pay for piracy even if you don’t pirate! Nice..
Copyright is where all the battles seem to be these days, with insufficient people looking at alternative ways of earning money in the Internet era, where copying is what makes the Internet so powerful in the first place.
* to Brussels, that is. Same thing, usually.
Last week I learned how to download podcasts to my mobile phone. It wasn’t that difficult: it just takes time to set up and download. I needed first of all to subscribe to the website RSS stream, then I had to download the MP3s to the computer and after that (whew) I had to use Nokia’s file download facility to transfer the stuff via a Bluetooth connection to the mobile phone.
The quality of the podcasts is very good. I was listening to the Skeptoid series on the phone while I was in London for a day last week, and often I thought that someone beside me was talking to me. It’s like my own “on demand” radio series for listening to when nothing else seems worthwhile listening to, which is kind of cool. I also downloaded the “Lie of the Land” series from RTE about the history of map-making in Ireland. I’ve been listening to that over the last few days.
The amount of space available on my phone is tiny: only around 400 Mb, which isn’t much when I am trying to download a few radio series to the phone. I suspect I will need to delete early and often if I am to get any benefit from it at all. I then discovered a dreadfully inconvenient problem with my Nokia. It doesn’t have any “Forward” or “Rewind” functions. When listening to a 30 minute show, this can be irritating in the extreme.
Do you listen to podcasts, and do you have a favourite show that you listen to?
I’m a big fan of mind mapping apps: probably because I have a mind that often needs quite a bit of organising. While I was working on my thesis, I always had a copy of Mind Manager close at hand. It was invaluable as it allowed me to make sense of large amounts of research, organising it into useful categories quickly and efficiently. Now that I have since moved on into a new job, I don’t have it any more and I have felt slightly bereft, having to make do for the time being with Microsoft’s One Note.
Mind Manager is an excellent application, particularly if you have presentations or project plans to write on the fly. However, it’s a bit pricey, so the alternative is a free application on the web.
Mind42 allows you to write, save and publish your maps on the web. You can also collaborate with other users, co-writing or reviewing a map as part of a virtual brainstorming session. The mapping tools are rudimentary but nevertheless easy to use and more than adequate for the majority of mapping tasks.
I tried to publish the above mind-map to my blog using the publishing tools, but unfortunately the code provided does not work on WordPress.
It’s just an observation, but technology companies that no longer take risks are companies in great trouble.I’m talking about companies that have become used to a particular “way” of doing things. Where everything eventually becomes routine. New products are predictable. The launches are the same, the engineering details say more about technology obsolescence than they do about customer needs. These companies are in serious danger of extinction.
In the world of technology, the customer has become used to being spoiled. Customers want new, they want different. If they don’t get it from you, there are plenty of alternative options. This market is no place for those who wish to play it safe. You make it big by innovating. And innovating, more often than not, means taking a risk with the company’s money.
But here’s the problem. Very often, managers look at the new, the untried, the dangerous, and the instinct of self-preservation kicks in. Instead, they seek refuge in the safe world of numbers. Well, numbers are important, but they are not everything. Numbers only tell you what has happened in the past, but the past is a poor guide to the future. If you have a product that is on the decline, every promotion and marketing effort under the sun will only provide short-term respite from that long-term downwards trend. The refuge of numbers can be a leaky tent indeed.
That’s where vision and risk-taking come in. The people who impressed me greatly in my last job were those who said “I know this might not work at all. I know this may hurt us. I know I might need to look for a new job if it goes wrong. But, even still, we need to do it”. People like these are vitally important because they have a sense of what the customer might actually want, and they are prepared to stick their head over the parapet. They may often indeed be proven wrong, but that is rarely a reason to think less of them. Without people with that talent for seeking out the different and seeing it through, a company will go nowhere.
Here’s the formula: you’ve got to listen to your customers, feel their pain, then design solutions that will blow their mind. That’s it: apart from the fact that you need to keep doing it for as long as you can.
With innovation, failure is a high probability. Without innovation, failure is a certainty. Innovation gives your company a fighting chance.
Sunny spells and scattered showers 
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