DESPITE HIGH-speed broadband, touchscreen devices and the spread of cloud computing, we are merely in the steam age of digital, Prof Michael Hulme told an audience at Eircom HQ recently.

As part of the Eircom Digital Academy lecture series for its staff, Prof Hulme, a futurologist and observer of digital trends, predicted that by 2020 most devices would simply talk to each other without “primitive” manual intervention from humans.

He noted this future was not so far away and we were well on the way to a society where ever-present mobile devices would connect us to each other and our homes as well as playing a role in monitoring our health.

Data would be the key driver of personal technology and had been since 2007, a year that represented a paradigm shift: “We no longer had to seek out information; it began to come to us.”

The iPhone was launched in 2007 and although Apple did not invent it or push technology, it was responsible for mass adoption, Prof Hulme added.

One of the biggest challenges in the next decade, he warned, would be the sheer amount of data created. The challenge was not just one of network capacity; the difficulty for the end user would be in sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Prof Hulme said he foresaw “an intelligent information management system whereby, to some degree, the artificial intelligence [AI] component is actually representative of the individual”.

This would be like a virtual version of ourselves that could carry out searches and find the information we would ideally choose but in a fraction of the time.

“It’s almost performing as if it is part of the human being but where the AI function is particularly powerful is in weighing up complex balances of information,” he said.

Personalised search and recommendation systems like those on offer from Google or other search engine companies were “quite primitive” in comparison to what we can expect in the future.

“There’s an issue of depth of data for a start; the data they [current recommendation systems] are taking is relatively skin deep.”

The ability to make what Prof Hulme called “ambivalent judgments” would be the mark of future information management systems that could mimic personal preferences and the quirks of human nature.

“This sophisticated AI won’t appear until many years beyond 2020 but I would expect to see us employing these agents on our behalf eventually.”