Technology change is accelerating. So what will life be like in 2020?
By Danny Bradbury
May 14, 2010
May 14, 2010
Ten years is a long time in technology, and the pace of development is getting faster. In a decade, it will affect our daily lives in innovative and exciting ways on both a personal and a professional basis. See how our fictional character, Sheila Robinson, might navigate her day in 2020.
Our past may be analogue, but it is littered with binary visions of the future. Science fiction movies paint pictures that are either unrealistically euphoric—humans wear silver suits and robots do all the work—or dystopian, in which we’re reduced to banging rocks together in a world ravaged by nuclear war. What will life really be like in 2020? Our history is more nuanced than these scenarios predicted, which suggests that our future will be, too.
We know that today’s problems will be tomorrow’s crises. A trashed economy burdened by ballooning public debt won’t be able to sustain the health-care system that retiring boomers are about to stretch. We’re running out of energy as well as money, and can’t seem to stop poisoning the air with oil and coal. Large parts of the developing world are short on water, but are acquiring the high-tech skills that North America is hemorrhaging.
We’ll be busy enough using technology to solve these problems without mulling the possibilities of nuclear-powered flying cars.
But here’s the problem with predicting the future: it’s arriving at an accelerated pace. The computer changed the world far more quickly than the car did. The Internet quicker still. Now, with the development of genetic engineering and personal genomics, the rate of world change will speed up even more.
Exponential development carries implications for our future predictions, according to Stuart Feldman, vice-president of engineering at Google and the former president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Everybody overestimates what an exponential [change] will look like in the short run, and most people completely miss how big an exponential is when it gets going,” he said. “Where you are on the timescale matters. And so 10 years is interesting, because that means a whole bunch of things that are exponentiating will be important, but they won’t be dominating yet.”
In an uncertain future, we can at least rely on Moore’s law to tell us what we have to work with. It states the complexity of minimum component costs doubles every two years. In 2020, that will give us 32 times the available computing power that we have today, at the same cost and size. The same goes for storage, and all of this assumes that the quantum leaps promised by molecular computing and nanotechnology haven’t yet materialized.
That should mean we can process information more quickly, and in new ways. It is significant because information and our ability to search for it will shape our responses to all other challenges. “Our brain does only one thing: it brings in information and processes it through pattern matching, and compares patterns to previous ones,” said David Evans, chief technologist and innovations lead in the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco. Technology will aid in this. “Information processing will be a bedrock layer.”
Then there’s Metcalfe’s law, which will also shape how our technology develops. Attributed to Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, it establishes the value of a network as the square of the number of its nodes. The more things that are connected, the more quickly its value grows.
We have already seen this value in social networks, which have helped to create ventures such as Wikipedia. But in the future, people will be only one part of the connection. “As of 2010, the global Internet is starting to go wireless, and that has profound implications on use and adoption…of all kinds of technologies that can be networked,” said Lawrence Surtees, IDC’s lead analyst covering the Canadian telecom services sector. “I can see a global Internet of things. Wireless data allows for machine-to-machine communication.”
That could mean everything from municipal water companies to air-quality control regulators could use tiny sensors to monitor what’s happening in their infrastructures and others. “Imagine if by wearing sensors in your clothes you’re able to track what’s in the environment just by being present,” said Surtees’ colleague David Senf, research director for infrastructure solutions at IDC. This could extend to bio-sensors that monitor your own well-being and communicate your vital signs back to a cloud-based service that monitors the outbreak of symptoms within a social network of people, for example.
As the immediate social and cultural effects of technological developments become more explicit and wider-ranging, other possibilities arise. One that looms large, according to several pundits, is the singularity. This theory suggests that, as our technological development continues exponentially, we’ll eventually reach a point where the world evolves so quickly it becomes unrecognizable. In one popular scenario, we create an artificial intelligence so smart it can develop better versions of itself systematically, eventually creating a god-like entity far surpassing conventional human intelligence. Some think this will be an external development, that we’ll create a computer that can outsmart us. Others think we’ll develop the ability to rapidly evolve ourselves artificially, or to biologically merge with an artificial intelligence that we have created.
Some, such as Feldman, don’t believe in the singularity. “We can’t yet simulate a human, for example,” he said. “Therefore I don’t assume that singularity in the simple-minded form happens in any forecastable time.” Others think it will happen, and posit various time frames. “I believe it’s only a function of time,” said Geoff Shmigelsky, an associate founder at the Singularity University, a Bay-area institute that teaches how developing technologies could change the world. If and when it does happen—and most people think it’ll happen long after 2020—all bets for life as we know it are off.
Sheila gave up worrying about privacy around five years ago, when she realized the amount of information about her in the cloud was enough to create these kinds of profiles. Like most others, she surrendered. She sends Mark off to school. The bus operates on biodiesel to minimize carbon emissions; it is part of a pilot project where buses are driven semi-automatically.
Geoff Shmigelsky, associate founder at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, said we’ll see this technology piloted by 2015. “By 2020, they may even actually come to market, as limited AI enables you to get from point A to point B”.
8:00 a.m. A freelance world Rather than working a 9-to-5 job for a single full-time employer, Sheila works for herself as a virtual personal assistant. She walks to a telecottage—a local workspace occupied by other freelance professionals—as a means of separating her working life from her personal one.
Sebastien Ruest, vice-president for services and technology research at IDC, predicts the devolution of the business landscape into a series of synaptic corporations, in which technology has enabled everyone to work for themselves in constantly reforming virtual teams.
“In 2020, we will be at the point where I can create and dismantle a corporation in a very short time, because I can break out business, infrastructure and application layers,” Ruest said. “These can create the same types of services that you get from a physical corporation today.”
9:00 a.m. An automated life Sheila uses a variety of cloud-based online services to get her job done. A client in France initiates a video conference with her (only 10 per cent of the people she deals with use audio only any more) and asks her to book a conference call with his associates. She uses intelligent agent software to query all of their diaries and arrange the call automatically. None of this happens on a PC. People still use them, but most services are now cloud-based. Organic LED displays embedded directly into any surface make it possible to access your data wherever you are.
“Those displays will be cheap and prevalent. Walls can be computer displays,” said Michael Liebhold, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our mobile devices over time will be equipped with the high-power short-range wireless capability to wirelessly communicate with a receiver in that display.”
Noon The cashless lunch For lunch, Sheila drops into the local Subway, which dismissed 90 per cent of its staff two years ago. She verbally asks the computer for a foot-long egg salad sandwich (there are practically no tuna left). The near-field communication chip in her phone debits her account as the sandwich lands in the tray.
1:00 p.m. Personal finances Sheila needs a new washer-dryer, but doesn’t know if she can afford it. She shops online and her automated online banking agent tells her how far her budget can stretch.
Intelligent agents will play a bigger part in helping us to manage our budgets, said Rob Burbach, senior analyst for the financial insights and buyer behaviour practice at IDC. “You [will be able to] hit a button that says ‘Can I afford this, and are there any better deals anywhere else?’”
She can buy it, the agent replies, but she should cut back on some other luxuries, such as foregoing the Subway lunch and packing her own.
3:00 p.m. A new approach to health It’s time for Sheila’s medical appointment. Advances in personal genomics are rapidly changing the way we look after ourselves. In 2020, the technology already exists to create personally tailored medicines that will directly target cancers. However, slow regulatory processes prevent their approval. In 2035, when Sheila shows the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, her doctor will be able to create a pill to eradicate it from her system. Like many others, Sheila will live past 100, which will create its own social problems.
5:00 p.m. Higher learning At home again, Sheila helps Mark with his homework. He brings up his personal working space on the multi-touch kitchen table surface, while Sheila works on supper. He is struggling with a math problem. Sheila drags two elements together to create a quadratic equation. Mark’s face lights up as the table shows him that 10 students in his social network got the same result.
“Downloading texts to a specific device or using the Internet to update educational information regularly is something that we must look at,” said Erik Kruse, strategic marketing manager at Ericsson.
8:00 p.m. Date night Sheila’s date, John, picks her up for a night out. John used voice search technology while en route to help plan a romantic, cultured evening. The weather-aware search engine booked them into a French restaurant followed by an open-air performance of The Tempest. He picks Sheila up in a fully electric community car rented by the hour. When plugged into a charging point, it also serves as a battery, storing energy and feeding it to the grid when energy demands peak.
10:00 p.m. An augmented reality John and Sheila watch the Bard’s story unfold. Sheila’s augmented reality glasses recognize not only the speech in the play but also the actors, thanks to infrared symbols built into their clothing. As she watches, useful text springs up in front of her reminding her which character is which, and how the plot is unfolding.
11:30 p.m. Digital anxiety Just as she turns in, her client in France videos her. This is a downside of Sheila’s brave new world: work/life balance is harder to maintain. The conference call he was trying to arrange that morning has fallen through, and he needs to organize it for later that day. She directs the automated scheduling service to rebook everyone for a call at 3:00 p.m. central European time. As she struggles to sleep, she knows that the client could have done this himself. She worries about how much of her job is being automated, and wonders how she will reinvent herself to stay ahead. First search for her intelligent agent tomorrow: retraining opportunities.
Ilustrations: Jon Berkeley
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8:00 p.m. Date night Technology can help arrange social events, and transportation will be more environmentally friendly. 10:00 p.m. An augmented reality Forget rose-tinted glasses—prepare yourself for electronic ones with heads-up displays instead. 11:30 p.m. Digital anxiety Tomorrow’s world will force us to reinvent ourselves. 7:00 a.m. Say goodbye to privacy, and hello to convenience A dozen online services—and her house—know enormous amounts about Sheila and her day. |
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8:00 a.m. A freelance world Tomorrow’s worker will create and dismantle virtual teams on a daily basis. 9:00 a.m. An automated life Personal electronic assistants carry out a variety of tasks for us automatically. Noon The cashless lunch All hail the ‘lectronic Loonie: cash and possibly retail assistants are increasingly virtual. 3:00 p.m. A new approach to health Personal genomics will make medicine more targeted in tomorrow’s clinics. 1:00 p.m. Personal finances Money management is always difficult, but online services are there to help. 5:00 p.m. Higher learning New interfaces and electronic textbooks will make education more enjoyable and effective. |
Our past may be analogue, but it is littered with binary visions of the future. Science fiction movies paint pictures that are either unrealistically euphoric—humans wear silver suits and robots do all the work—or dystopian, in which we’re reduced to banging rocks together in a world ravaged by nuclear war. What will life really be like in 2020? Our history is more nuanced than these scenarios predicted, which suggests that our future will be, too.
We know that today’s problems will be tomorrow’s crises. A trashed economy burdened by ballooning public debt won’t be able to sustain the health-care system that retiring boomers are about to stretch. We’re running out of energy as well as money, and can’t seem to stop poisoning the air with oil and coal. Large parts of the developing world are short on water, but are acquiring the high-tech skills that North America is hemorrhaging.
We’ll be busy enough using technology to solve these problems without mulling the possibilities of nuclear-powered flying cars.
But here’s the problem with predicting the future: it’s arriving at an accelerated pace. The computer changed the world far more quickly than the car did. The Internet quicker still. Now, with the development of genetic engineering and personal genomics, the rate of world change will speed up even more.
Exponential development carries implications for our future predictions, according to Stuart Feldman, vice-president of engineering at Google and the former president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Everybody overestimates what an exponential [change] will look like in the short run, and most people completely miss how big an exponential is when it gets going,” he said. “Where you are on the timescale matters. And so 10 years is interesting, because that means a whole bunch of things that are exponentiating will be important, but they won’t be dominating yet.”
In an uncertain future, we can at least rely on Moore’s law to tell us what we have to work with. It states the complexity of minimum component costs doubles every two years. In 2020, that will give us 32 times the available computing power that we have today, at the same cost and size. The same goes for storage, and all of this assumes that the quantum leaps promised by molecular computing and nanotechnology haven’t yet materialized.
That should mean we can process information more quickly, and in new ways. It is significant because information and our ability to search for it will shape our responses to all other challenges. “Our brain does only one thing: it brings in information and processes it through pattern matching, and compares patterns to previous ones,” said David Evans, chief technologist and innovations lead in the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco. Technology will aid in this. “Information processing will be a bedrock layer.”
Then there’s Metcalfe’s law, which will also shape how our technology develops. Attributed to Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, it establishes the value of a network as the square of the number of its nodes. The more things that are connected, the more quickly its value grows.
We have already seen this value in social networks, which have helped to create ventures such as Wikipedia. But in the future, people will be only one part of the connection. “As of 2010, the global Internet is starting to go wireless, and that has profound implications on use and adoption…of all kinds of technologies that can be networked,” said Lawrence Surtees, IDC’s lead analyst covering the Canadian telecom services sector. “I can see a global Internet of things. Wireless data allows for machine-to-machine communication.”
That could mean everything from municipal water companies to air-quality control regulators could use tiny sensors to monitor what’s happening in their infrastructures and others. “Imagine if by wearing sensors in your clothes you’re able to track what’s in the environment just by being present,” said Surtees’ colleague David Senf, research director for infrastructure solutions at IDC. This could extend to bio-sensors that monitor your own well-being and communicate your vital signs back to a cloud-based service that monitors the outbreak of symptoms within a social network of people, for example.
As the immediate social and cultural effects of technological developments become more explicit and wider-ranging, other possibilities arise. One that looms large, according to several pundits, is the singularity. This theory suggests that, as our technological development continues exponentially, we’ll eventually reach a point where the world evolves so quickly it becomes unrecognizable. In one popular scenario, we create an artificial intelligence so smart it can develop better versions of itself systematically, eventually creating a god-like entity far surpassing conventional human intelligence. Some think this will be an external development, that we’ll create a computer that can outsmart us. Others think we’ll develop the ability to rapidly evolve ourselves artificially, or to biologically merge with an artificial intelligence that we have created.
Some, such as Feldman, don’t believe in the singularity. “We can’t yet simulate a human, for example,” he said. “Therefore I don’t assume that singularity in the simple-minded form happens in any forecastable time.” Others think it will happen, and posit various time frames. “I believe it’s only a function of time,” said Geoff Shmigelsky, an associate founder at the Singularity University, a Bay-area institute that teaches how developing technologies could change the world. If and when it does happen—and most people think it’ll happen long after 2020—all bets for life as we know it are off.
2020, a day in the life, in depth
7:00 a.m. Say goodbye to privacy, and hello to convenience Forty-year-old divorcee Sheila Robinson is awoken by the gentle beeping of her bedside clock. As she rises, her clock, connected to a cloud-based service with an intimate understanding of her daily lifestyle, reminds her of her schedule and warns that the rent and utility payments are due today. The smart meter connected to her house sees she has been using more energy in the daytime, because she’s been working at home while her son Mark was off sick from school. Her alarm clock asks if she would like to turn down her air conditioner by two degrees to compensate. She tells it not to, because Mark is back at school today.Sheila gave up worrying about privacy around five years ago, when she realized the amount of information about her in the cloud was enough to create these kinds of profiles. Like most others, she surrendered. She sends Mark off to school. The bus operates on biodiesel to minimize carbon emissions; it is part of a pilot project where buses are driven semi-automatically.
Geoff Shmigelsky, associate founder at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, said we’ll see this technology piloted by 2015. “By 2020, they may even actually come to market, as limited AI enables you to get from point A to point B”.
8:00 a.m. A freelance world Rather than working a 9-to-5 job for a single full-time employer, Sheila works for herself as a virtual personal assistant. She walks to a telecottage—a local workspace occupied by other freelance professionals—as a means of separating her working life from her personal one.
Sebastien Ruest, vice-president for services and technology research at IDC, predicts the devolution of the business landscape into a series of synaptic corporations, in which technology has enabled everyone to work for themselves in constantly reforming virtual teams.
“In 2020, we will be at the point where I can create and dismantle a corporation in a very short time, because I can break out business, infrastructure and application layers,” Ruest said. “These can create the same types of services that you get from a physical corporation today.”
9:00 a.m. An automated life Sheila uses a variety of cloud-based online services to get her job done. A client in France initiates a video conference with her (only 10 per cent of the people she deals with use audio only any more) and asks her to book a conference call with his associates. She uses intelligent agent software to query all of their diaries and arrange the call automatically. None of this happens on a PC. People still use them, but most services are now cloud-based. Organic LED displays embedded directly into any surface make it possible to access your data wherever you are.
“Those displays will be cheap and prevalent. Walls can be computer displays,” said Michael Liebhold, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our mobile devices over time will be equipped with the high-power short-range wireless capability to wirelessly communicate with a receiver in that display.”
Noon The cashless lunch For lunch, Sheila drops into the local Subway, which dismissed 90 per cent of its staff two years ago. She verbally asks the computer for a foot-long egg salad sandwich (there are practically no tuna left). The near-field communication chip in her phone debits her account as the sandwich lands in the tray.
1:00 p.m. Personal finances Sheila needs a new washer-dryer, but doesn’t know if she can afford it. She shops online and her automated online banking agent tells her how far her budget can stretch.
Intelligent agents will play a bigger part in helping us to manage our budgets, said Rob Burbach, senior analyst for the financial insights and buyer behaviour practice at IDC. “You [will be able to] hit a button that says ‘Can I afford this, and are there any better deals anywhere else?’”
She can buy it, the agent replies, but she should cut back on some other luxuries, such as foregoing the Subway lunch and packing her own.
3:00 p.m. A new approach to health It’s time for Sheila’s medical appointment. Advances in personal genomics are rapidly changing the way we look after ourselves. In 2020, the technology already exists to create personally tailored medicines that will directly target cancers. However, slow regulatory processes prevent their approval. In 2035, when Sheila shows the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, her doctor will be able to create a pill to eradicate it from her system. Like many others, Sheila will live past 100, which will create its own social problems.
5:00 p.m. Higher learning At home again, Sheila helps Mark with his homework. He brings up his personal working space on the multi-touch kitchen table surface, while Sheila works on supper. He is struggling with a math problem. Sheila drags two elements together to create a quadratic equation. Mark’s face lights up as the table shows him that 10 students in his social network got the same result.
“Downloading texts to a specific device or using the Internet to update educational information regularly is something that we must look at,” said Erik Kruse, strategic marketing manager at Ericsson.
8:00 p.m. Date night Sheila’s date, John, picks her up for a night out. John used voice search technology while en route to help plan a romantic, cultured evening. The weather-aware search engine booked them into a French restaurant followed by an open-air performance of The Tempest. He picks Sheila up in a fully electric community car rented by the hour. When plugged into a charging point, it also serves as a battery, storing energy and feeding it to the grid when energy demands peak.
10:00 p.m. An augmented reality John and Sheila watch the Bard’s story unfold. Sheila’s augmented reality glasses recognize not only the speech in the play but also the actors, thanks to infrared symbols built into their clothing. As she watches, useful text springs up in front of her reminding her which character is which, and how the plot is unfolding.
11:30 p.m. Digital anxiety Just as she turns in, her client in France videos her. This is a downside of Sheila’s brave new world: work/life balance is harder to maintain. The conference call he was trying to arrange that morning has fallen through, and he needs to organize it for later that day. She directs the automated scheduling service to rebook everyone for a call at 3:00 p.m. central European time. As she struggles to sleep, she knows that the client could have done this himself. She worries about how much of her job is being automated, and wonders how she will reinvent herself to stay ahead. First search for her intelligent agent tomorrow: retraining opportunities.
Ilustrations: Jon Berkeley
