Looking into the future but not being futuristic

IBM'S Mr Tony Davison likes looking into the future and imagining technological developments in 2020 or 2080. But don't call him a futurist.

"Futurists speak in that tone that counsellors have, which annoys me," he says. "They also always talk in numbers."

And they often suggest that we are looking at a pre-determined destination, where many variables will produce one result - THE future.

"There is no set future. There's millions of possible futures."

That's why he prefers the title "scenario forecaster" - not a bad job description, as such things go.

"I ask questions like 'what if' and 'why not'," he says with enjoyment.

In a less Buck Roger-ish world, he'll also go by "information architect" with the user technologies group at IBM's Hursley Laboratory in Britain. But he's found a rather fun niche job as a speaker on the future at various conferences.

His presentation methods are less Tomorrow's World than Dr Who - or, as the Guardian described it, "a mixture of Michael Jackson and computer software". He speaks from the stage as if talking to contemporaries far in the future, which allows him to reflect on the contrast between how technology is used in our "primitive" age and what might be accepted as the norm decades from now.

This week, he planned to bring an audience in Dublin to 2020. He imagines Europe in 2020 as a "knowledge economy and also a sensory economy".

A what? "As virtual experiences becomes more central, for generations to come physical experiences will become more and more important." He believes an entire economy will develop around providing people with sensory experiences, including experiences generated, ironically, through virtual reality.

Thus, he sees people flocking to group experiences such as film and theatre, although both will be transformed. "We should be able to give people the most incredible theatrical experiences - John Gilbert as Hamlet, Marilyn Monroe as Gertrude." As a harbinger of possibility, he gives the example of the virtually generated Oliver Reed in parts of the movie Gladiator, after the actor died midway through filming. Sensory experiences "will be a combination of technology and the real thing".

Travel in particular will change from today's journeys to a physical location. "You'll have wonderful virtual reality. Tourists will want to travel more, to experience something special." Visitors to Britain might come not for the Tower of London and the museums but to participate in a recreation of Camelot. "You'd have the total sensory experience of riding horses, of wearing chain mail. If you were jousting and got hit, you'd feel it" - although with the advantage of not actually being harmed.

As for computers, his fervent hope is that they will vanish. "I'd like to think that before I die I won't own a computer," he says. "Instead, I'll have a number of intelligent devices." He calls the PC "a joke. We're now finally beginning to understand that." PCs centralise information and isolate it. Even as a way of accessing the internet they are clumsy and heavy. We are already moving towards having multiple devices, he says, but the problem is that they still do not talk together and share information. He gives the example of the digital television device TiVo, "an isolated island of thought".

Why shouldn't your car be able to talk to TiVo, or your refrigerator, or your heating system? Communication across devices is gradually becoming possible through technological developments, such as computer language XML, which lets chunks of information describe themselves to, and be used in many ways by, a network. Mr Davison is working on IBM's MQSeries industry standard, which lets devices exchange information across different platforms.

Mix such developments together and by 2020, says Mr Davison, "you'll be living in a cooperative world of devices. For example, you might be driving home and say, 'God, I'm tired,' and a computer in the vehicle would interpret that as meaning, 'wants to stay in tonight, watch a movie and doesn't want to cook'." The car would tell the TV at home to order up a film for Web delivery and the TV would know your taste in films and what you've seen before. The car would tell the freezer to serve up a pizza - the freezers by then could work jukebox-style, says Mr Davison, and send the pizza directly into the oven.

Then you arrive home. "As soon as you sit down the sofa turns the TV on," Mr Davison says gleefully. "And all the technology you need to do this is available now" - it just hasn't been pieced together.

Hmmm! What if you are trying to conduct an affair in this future world and have the computer system set to "seduce", when plans go awry and you unexpectedly arrive in with your spouse instead? Who would want a computer system that would blow your cover?

Mr Davison laughs. "Ah, but people always think computer systems would only operate in a linear manner. On the contrary, it would react to the current situation. If it had been set up this evening for your affair, it would spot immediately if you walked in with your wife instead and change the scenario."

Nonetheless, it would appear such systems will inevitably provide the subject matter of tomorrow's farces and comedies.

Mr Davison also sees human cloning coming "fairly soon", because regardless of whether a given society may approve of it, other places in the world will allow it, and it is already technically possible.

Technology will also help us to start cracking all the genetically carried forms of disease. And, he says, eventually we'll have neural implants - computer chips embedded directly into our brains - that could return sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, or simply increase our existing intellectual and sensory capabilities.

"These will come in the second half of the century and that's only due to the time it will take for human acceptance," he says.

Wouldn't such developments mean that computer systems would need to know intimate details about each of us, the kind of information we are already struggling to keep private from hackers, overly eager governments, and other forms of unwanted surveillance? Well, yes, says Mr Davison, and balancing privacy against security and what we want to be able to do in the future will become a central debate for society.

But overall, Mr Davison, at 52, has what he calls his former Net researcher and hippie's belief that "information should be open and available. We didn't believe in shutting doors. Freedom tends to come with the proliferation of information. Technology will provide solutions, but we need to be applying technology to the right problems."