My Talk with the Future

I had a talk with the Future this morning. It wasn’t a surprise; I had set up the meeting. What surprised me was that the Future had accepted. I was sitting there thinking about what the Future would be like to talk to  & wondering why it was late, when my office door opened & there it was, a Timbuk2 messenger bag over one shoulder & a cup of coffee from Cosi in one hand.

“Sorry, I didn’t check my calendar this morning like I usually do, so I didn’t know until just now what time our meeting was.” It unslung the bag, sat in my other chair & fished out a paper calendar & a notebook. It must have seen my expression because its next words were: “I used to carry around a Laptop, tablet & a smart phone, but I gave them to my friends a while ago.”

“How come”, I asked.

“Well, in the first place, it was just too much to carry around. I used the laptop to write & do simulations, the tablet to keep track of blogs, media & social media, & the phone for, you know, a phone plus healthcare apps, music apps, stuff like that. It was just too inconvenient. Then there was all the app incompatibility, like with my calendar… I had Outlook first for my calendar, but that wouldn’t synch with anything, so I moved to Google for everything, but that wouldn’t synch with Outlook. Then I tried Tempo & Calendar5, but they rarely seemed to synch all of my events & meetings, and then I wrote an iCal app, but could never get it to synch with Outlook or the calendar on my Android phone, so…  & that was just for my calendar. You get the picture. Now when I’m in the Present, I just put things down in pencil in my calendar & erase them when I need to.”

What about a smart phone, though,” I asked. “You must use a smart phone.”

“Yeah, I had an iPhone, but it bricked itself when I updated to IOS7, so I got a Samsung Galaxy, but some of the apps I was using weren’t available. It was way cool, but not as convenient as the iPhone. After a while, I felt like I just wanted a phone, so I went back to my flip phone. I’m the Future, so I have other ways of staying connected. Of course, this is just when I’m in the present. In the future, things are different”

OK, I thought, this will be interesting. “So what about in the future” I asked smiling a little at the leading question.

 “Well, I thought you’d never ask,” said the Future. “But you should tell me, you being a technology futurist & all.”

“The thing about being a technology futurist,” I said, “is that you have two ways to look at the future – trends predicted from the lens of the past & imagination informed by what you think is possible & interesting. You might not even see the utility in something interesting. Ken Olsen, my boss’ boss at the Digital Equipment Corporation, famously said “I see no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home.” Of course, he was talking about VAX computers, but missed the PC revolution already underway.”

“So this means that you want to ask me about the future,” said the Future. “OK – three questions, but if I think they’re not insightful, I’ll cut you off.”

“That’s fair, so question 1… back to connectivity. The trend today seems to be toward wearables Google Glass & a whole variety of what appear to be clever visualization & presentation devices, most of which are cloud-connected. Will these actually take over from smaller current devices?”

“What do you think?” the Future asked.

“You’re going to make me work for this… OK, I think hybrid devices will evolve so that you have some sort of small hub that connects you to virtual storage & computing power as well as to a variety of presentation devices some of them wearable, but some not. This will take time as we’re currently stuck with the tension between laptops (& even desktops) versus smartphones & tablets, but even there we seem to be moving back towards laptops with 13 inch “tablets”, attached keyboards…”

“Well,” the Future said as it got up & started pacing, “Can’t stay still too long… & I can’t actually show you anything… this being the Present & all, but… you’re not so very wrong. Several different types of devices will evolve into hubs. Smart phones & tablets won’t, but things like Wi-Fi hotspots & other communications & media controllers will, & before you ask smart phones & tablets are too specialized to evolve like this. Laptops don’t go away, they are just assimilated & evolved… Some people realize this now, but in 5-8 years most people will realize that they need a device that is able not only to run apps or do voice & text communications, but that they still actually need access to compute cycles & much larger amounts of storage than the cloud currently provides. Everyone will need terabytes of storage for media, local & remote compute cycles, many types of presentation devices &…”

“Wait – what about search algorithms, storage, bandwidth constraints,”

“Not so fast, I need a biobreak & a couple of Frescas, then we can talk about some of that other stuff.”

…

“OK – two more questions…”

“Search,” I say, “I think search is key. This is what we found out at Documentum. You can store & retrieve terabytes or petabytes (I’m not so sure about zetabytes), but you have to be able to articulate what you are looking for in a way that is relatively unambiguous & the system has to be able to then effectively search a large volume of data in finite time, retrieve what you want & present it in a way that is understandable (or at least potentially understandable). That’s minimally three hard problems that may require new ways of initiating queries, new or very improved ways of representing many disparate types of information from structured alphanumeric to images & everything in between; not to mention how to present all this stuff…”

“Stop, stop,” said the Future… “All true, but… search is the human facing key, you can’t accomplish anything without it, but representation is the system key. Hadoop & its competitors today continue to develop & soon there is no type of information that cannot be stored & then searched. Column & noSQL databases become storage utilities that can deal with zetabytes of information routinely & most people have at least multiple terabytes of storage for their “stuff”: photos, videos, documents… everything in their life. The cloud is moot, because except in very extreme security cases, everything is in the “cloud”, & again Amazon, Google etc. have given up this business as a commodity that is run in common. People are not aware of the need for acquisition or management of storage or computing resources because they are just there…”

“Isn’t data & personal privacy an issue?” I ask.

“Sure, but at the point where information sharing & large scale analysis has basically cured many current diseases, close to eliminated eFraud & identity theft, created a transparent financial system & allowed the flowering of millions of individual entrepreneurial efforts, people are less concerned with the privacy issues.”

“This is like 200 years from now, no?”

“Actually not that far from now. Once these changes start, It’s both hard to stop them & opinion begins to favor them… OK, have to go, lot’s of things happening…”

“Will I see you again? There’s a lot more to talk about. What happens to social media? How does app development & programming evolve? Is what we call AI important or just something we made up? Can we…”

“Too much to talk about now, & sure, we can sit down again, just make another appointment”

The Future smiled, picked up his messenger bag & his half finished Fresca & walked out into the corridor. I walked to the door & looked up & down the hall, but only saw the present.

Stay tuned for my next posts:

•         a path to productive analytics for under-resourced healthcare organizations
•         the evolution & implications of search for how we interact & work