FUTUROLOGY:Many companies employ futurologists who keep an eye on developments and trends to predict the future, and some of the findings are mind-boggling, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
WHAT COMPANY hasn’t wished at some point for a crystal ball, to see into the future and better understand the shape of the world ahead? Some of the world’s largest technology companies actually have one – in human form.
These futurists (or futurologists; they seem to go by either title) keep an eye on cutting-edge developments in science and technology to help predict what may lie ahead in the next five to 10 years – or even up to 50 years.
They help companies think about product strategy and shifting customer markets, but they also go out to talk to corporate customers, and make for popular speakers at corporate events.
It is just about the coolest job around, says David Evans, technology giant Cisco’s resident futurist. And the futurists from various companies do get together now and then; where the table talk must be pretty darn interesting.
At Cisco, Evan’s principal role is as an “outward facing futurist”, which means he talks to clients “and helps them in understanding where the world is going”.
In one of his latest presentations, he went through the top 10 trends he expects to see over the next 10 years, which begins with some ruminations about how the internet will be the meeting-place of millions of devices, sensors, machines and anything else that can be given an IP address and get online.
It ends with some mind-boggling predictions of what humans will be like in another decade or two. “Any child born today will easily live to be 200 to 300,” is how he concluded a talk recently given in London, leaving an audience filled with startled expressions.
How are such presentations generally received? “At the beginning of the presentation, people are very open. As you get to the end, they get more sceptical,” he laughs. “But that’s understandable, because a lot of this is the stuff of science fiction. But it’s based on science fact. These are not going to happen tomorrow, but in the next decade or so.”
Some of those changes are coming at high speed, faster than most people realise, primarily thanks to the incredible information sharing engine of the internet. “The net has been a huge catalyst,” he says.
Human knowledge doubled every century until the 1900s, says Evans, but nowadays it is every two to three years. Some 70 per cent of all information has been created since the internet began. In 50 years’ time, he says, 95 per cent of everything humans know will have been discovered in those 50 years. The 21st century will be the equivalent to 20,000 years of human progress. The internet is becoming an internet of things. Somewhere between 2008 and 2009, we crossed a line where there were more connected devices online than people. We have about two devices per person now, he says, and in the next decade that will rise to seven. By the end of the decade, there will be 50 billion “things” online – things that can communicate with each other.
Or with us. There’s already a pill that contains a tiny chip that can give feedback about the inside of the patient to a physician, he says.
With all these objects and devices, we’ll be creating massive amounts of information – the latest term of measurement needed to enable people to talk about such amounts is the zettabyte, a data equivalent of the content of a stack of books stretching from the Earth to Pluto . . . 20 times, he says.
Content itself is getting fatter too, he says. “Medical scans a few years ago were a few megabytes. Now they’ve moved to gigabytes and are going on to terabytes.”
All of this is going to create what Evans calls “the zettaflood”, and the way we build the internet will have to change to accommodate it.
On the other hand, he says, technology is going to start to adapt to us, rather than us having to adapt to it. No longer will we see those devices around our house that always have a digital timeclock registering 12 o’clock, because we could never figure out how to change it, he says.
Instead, we are looking ahead at a decade of rapid development of brain-machine interfaces. Toyota has already developed a mind-controlled wheelchair. The University of Maryland is working on a brain-controlled prosthesis. Thinking, he says, is going to be our new communication interface with devices.
And we’re going to be able to start creating things on demand, too, using 3D printers. It may all still seem a bit Star Trek, but Evans actually produces several items “printed” in metal, resin, and plastic, including a plastic bicycle chain.
“In the coming years, we’ll think nothing of downloading physical goods,” he says. Already, you can “take parts out of printers and put them into fighter planes”. A machine has printed an entire 180-part propeller – the only reason it couldn’t be printed in working form is that there isn’t a printer large enough and so it must be produced in separate parts.
If the propeller had been machined in a traditional way, it would have cost $900,000 (€690,000) and taken nine months. Using the printer, it cost $25,000 (€19,000) and took 1.5 months. That’s only the start – researchers are already able to print complex geometries, prostheses – even skin and organs. And food. Or homes and buildings. Over the next decade, we will have such 3D printers in our homes.
This is where he gets to his most controversial conclusions, such as: “Within 10 to 15 years, we will create machines on par with humans in terms of intelligence and interactions.”
He feels that it is likely that by 2029, we will be able to stop the ageing process.
Even the more mundane elements of his presentation are deeply challenging. By the time he reaches the point of concluding that humans may live forever, you wonder whether humans themselves will be able to handle this pace of technological change, much less the ethical and philosophical issues.
Evans’s answer is routed back in the realm of prediction. If our own brains can’t handle it all, he says, it’s quite likely that we will be able to start augmenting our thinking capabilities with future technologies anyway. “I think we have tremendous ability to take what is coming at us,” he says with a grin. Wait around for 10 years, and you can see if he is right.
Dave Evans is on Twitter @davethefuturist
