By Gail Balfour

You unlock the door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. You enjoy your own targeted newscast, played on your paper thin tv that unrolls from a spindle on the wall. While eating meals and takingvitamins designed specifically for your genotype, you share small talk with your constant companion, a wireless wearable computer. It banters with you, and even manages to sound sympathetic about your overloaded schedule. And you don’t need to worry that gasoline prices skyrocketed years ago, because your vehicle no longer needs gas to run. There’s a signpost up ahead. Is it the twilight zone? no. It’s your future. And it’s coming soon.

“I spend a lot of time trying to imagine the future,” said Dr. Andrew Woodsworth, director general of the National Research Council’s Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT) in Ottawa. Woodsworth has witnessed and taken part in a plethora of new inventions, including researching and rolling out the first phases of the Internet in Canada. He said the success of the Web actually came as a big surprise. “About 14 years ago…nobody could see a commercial use for it. I spoke to the major telcos and they couldn’t. I spoke to major engineering firms and they couldn’t see it either. I think it’s fair to say it surprised almost everyone,” he said.

Woodsworth, who is trained as an astrophysicist, likes to compare the looming unknown to the vastness of deep space.

“The biggest impediment to imagining how the universe works is that none of us have ever experienced it. I think it’s a little bit like that when we think about where we can go with technology.”

Imagining the future is a full-time job for Richard Worzel. The Toronto-based futurist, founder of http://www.futuresearch.com and author of Who Owns Tomorrow? often gets asked about the future scenarios we all watched on popular sci-fi shows. He likes to quote author Arthur C. Clarke in response to that one: “The future isn’t what it used to be.”

Still, plenty of the scenarios in sci-fi pop culture are realistic today, he said. But many have turned out not to be practical, or indeed anything that people would actually want. At least, not yet. A completely paperless office, for one thing, is something that has been possible for a long time already. However, Worzel pointed out, human beings seem to want printed copies of everything, even if the documents are all produced electronically. Also possible soon are self-driving cars but, like the paperless office, these will require a cultural shift.

And as for a housecleaning robot, Worzel said we are still a long way from the “Rosie the Robot” model, mostly because robotic technology has proved much harder to perfect than originally thought. There is the technological wherewithal today to have a crudely built model that can perform simple tasks. The reality is, though, that people probably wouldn’t be willing to invest in the significant cost required to have such a thing brought to market in sufficient quantities for it to be commercially successful, and therefore fund the iterative development required of this tech innovation.

Ultimately, Worzel said, consumer wallets drive the success of any new invention.

Woodsworth agreed. “It’s pretty clear that we can have the greatest idea in the world, but if we can’t get it commercialized we are going to have a hard job of affecting the lives of Canadians.”

THE BIOSCIENCE BOOM
The most dramatic tech revolution we are likely to see in the next decade will be in biosciences, Worzel said. This area encompasses health, environmental, industrial and agricultural research. “We are used to thinking of it as entirely health-related, but it’s much more than that.”

Hydrogen cars, for example, have gotten a lot of press lately, but Worzel said they are “not ready for primetime” just yet. For one thing, they require a substantial investment in new technology. “It’s got so many problems that it’s going to take a long time before we get there — and I’m not convinced that we will ever get there.”

Worzel said, however, that a fuel called “eco-ethanol” is within our grasp now. Ethanol has been used as a gas additive or substitute for decades. Now, companies are researching the use of bioengineered enzymes from corn or even fast growing weeds. The cellulose would then be burned as fuel. “It reduces dependence on imported oil, gives farmers something new to grow for which there is a ready market, and you reduce emissions dramatically. There will be no sulphur, lead or heavy metal emissions.” The best thing is that it would require no shift in how cars are built. “You could take whatever car you are driving today and fill it with ethanol. You might want to get your mechanic to retune your engine because ethanol burns slightly hotter than gasoline,” he said, “but it would require absolutely zero change in infrastructure.”

So, if it’s possible today — and a better solution — why aren’t we doing it already? “Because it’s different; it requires thinking in a different way,” Worzel said.

In the meantime, he added, hybrid gas/electric cars will become more popular, as they have now been around long enough to work the bugs out.

SELF-DRIVING CARS
Speaking of transportation, what about cars that can drive themselves? We may actually start to see this in the next several years, Worzel said. “But I don’t think that’s going to hurry into the marketplace.

I think it’s going to creep into the marketplace.”

For one thing, who gets the blame if there is an accident? For another, they will require a cultural shift because many people actually enjoy driving.

“But even someone who likes driving would probably be amenable to a self-driving car under the right circumstances.


Elements of the self-driving car model are already appearing in the marketplace, he said. “It started with ABS. And then individual wheel differential control. There are cars now with infrared and/or radar detectors on them that will tell you when you are about to back into something.”

Some cars now are also being developed with alarms that go off when you drift out of a lane, and radar-controlled cruise control to keep you at set distance from other cars.

Combine this functionality with GPS, and you have gone a long way towards relinquishing control, he said.

The future may one day see a high-speed lane on highways reserved exclusively for computer-controlled cars. And because they will all drive at the same speed, they would be able to travel much faster and still be safer.

INTERACTIVE COMPUTERS
Interactivity is obviously an increasing trend in technology. IBM is researching ways “to give eyes and ears” to computer applications, said Dr. David Nahamoo, department group manager for human language technologies at IBM Research, T. J. Watson Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Today, Nahamoo said, humans end up adapting their behaviour to a computer’s limitations. IBM is working on the reverse scenario: adapting the computer’s behaviour to interact more naturally with humans “as if the computer were a colleague.”

Research shows people often prefer talking to machines over people; for one thing, they are non-judgemental, he said.

The use of “natural language understanding” applications will explode in a handful of years, and the majority of services like call routing will be automated within the next three to five years, he predicts.

In the meantime, interactive and navigation technology will continue to increase in popularity, but there are challenges. “I’m driving, the radio’s blasting and trucks are passing by. I want to do things with my hands-free microphone, but because of the enormous noise, there will be difficulty with speech recognition to deal with these issues,” he said.

“But when you talk to someone in a noisy environment, what do you do? You start watching the person’s lips. So in cars, you will start seeing cameras showing up next to the rear-view mirror.”

The computer would be “looking” at the driver all the time, and would be able to combine the visual information with the audio input to figure out what the person is saying.

To make interactive scenarios as “natural” as possible, IBM is also working on speech engines that sound appropriately apologetic or happy, depending on the context of the conversation. “When I call a system to relay bad news, I don’t want the system to respond in a happy mode,” Nahamoo said.

FLEXIBLE MONITORS
Back on the home front, most people will soon be able to afford really big, really flat TVs. And they may be able to roll them up like a poster when they’re done watching, said Dr. Beng Ong, Xerox fellow and manager of advanced materials and organic electronics at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) in Mississauga, Ont.

“Right now, most people couldn’t afford a 42-inch LCD display,” so a flexible, lightweight TV that you can roll up or hang on the wall like a piece of art “may seem farfetched now, but it won’t seem that way 10 years from now.”

In order to make devices such as this, you need flexible integrated circuits made with organic or plastic material.

Traditional silicon chips are made with glass and are rigid. These flexible circuits will also play in the e-book market. “Right now you can have an e-book on a PDA, but they all have rigid frames. Wouldn’t you like to have an e-book that feels like paper and is flexible, but you can refresh the content?”Ong admits that e-paper is not a new concept.

“We were talking about it 25 years ago.” What’s different now, he said, is that the tools and the technology to make it possible is available. Researchers at Xerox have recently developed a semi-conductive ink that can be used to “print” dielectric components onto a plastic circuit. “Most semi-conductor materials cannot be processed in liquid, and those that can be are very sensitive to the oxygen in the air. The moment they get exposed to oxygen, they degrade.”

However, Xerox has pioneered a method of printing the semi-conductor channels in open air and low temperatures using standard ink-jet printers. This is significant, Ong said, because most materials developed previously have required processing at high temperatures and in expensive vacuum environments. These new bendable, low-cost and lightweight alternatives will open up all sorts of possibilities for flexible devices that the average consumer will be able to afford, Ong said.

Besides being used for super-cool displays, there are many other business cases for inexpensive, flexible circuits, such as radio frequency (RF) tags that could be read by sensors in place of barcode scanners. “If one can do that — put RF tags on all products — a shopper would be able to go into a grocery store, load all the items into a cart and have them picked up simultaneously by the sensor when going to the checkout. There’s no lineup, there’s no cashier. Wouldn’t that be nice?”Worzel also had some predictions about TV. He compares the advent of high-definition TV to that of colour television.

As soon as colour TVs came out, people couldn’t wait to buy them, because the difference was so significant from black and white.

HD TV has been around awhile, he said. But only now, combined with the availability of a digital signal and large-scale plasma or LCD displays, will the technology really take off. “The three of these things together are producing a picture quality that is so startlingly better, at a price that is starting to be more affordable.”

SUPER COMPUTE POWER
On the backend of most new technology and research is compute power, which is becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous all the time.

“Extraordinarily large supercomputers are going to be commonplace in the next five years. These are really supposed to change how a lot of things happen,” said Dr. William Pulleyblank, director of exploratory server systems and director of the Deep Computing Institute, also at IBM’s Watson Center.

Some of the most profound changes people will see in their lives will be in medical areas, he said. For example, computers today can simulate what will happen when a car crashes. “But I can’t do [complex simulations] yet with people.

Why not? It’s not that we think cars are more important than people. The real reason is that, until recently, we simply hadn’t had enough compute capability to address [these more complex systems],” he said.

“Now, we are able to drill down to an atomic or molecular level and look at how two drugs interact, or how two molecules interact and see the effect it will have. When I look at a car, I don’t really have to go to that level.”

He predicts that because of this increased compute power, prescription drugs may actually be tailored to an individual’s DNA within five years. Worzel also expects this will happen soon. “It’s leading away from the traditional model of pharmaceuticals — the ‘blockbuster’ drug, where the same drug is given to everyone who has the same disease.”

So how will we see supercomputers change our lives? “If we do it right, people won’t be aware we are doing it,” Pulleyblank said.

“You will go to the doctor like you have always done, but the prescription will work right the first time. Or the weather forecasts will get a whole lot better; you will start to realize that they are always right.”

TRUE WIRELESS CHANGES ALL
Jonathan Eunice, president, principal analyst and IT advisor with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, agreed that in the next few years computation itself will be so ubiquitous that it will be “virtually free.” On the content side, he envisions a world where more and more will be available on a subscription basis, computers will all have “instant on” capabilities, most appliances will be cable free, e-ink and e-paper will finally take off, open-source software will become pervasive and there will be “big bandwidth almost everywhere.”

The “always on, always connected” world that people have been talking about for years is finally now “becoming pretty real,” thanks to Wi-Fi, and the beginnings of Bluetooth, he said. For example, using new networking technologies, proximate devices will soon be able talk to each other. “Suddenly your TV remote becomes a remote for your blender or your dryer or whatever. Your cellphone may also end up being a remote control device.”

Eunice predicted two technologies in this area, both from Sun Microsystems, will soon see more use: Jini, which simplifies the connection and sharing of devices on a network, and JXTA, a set of open-source peer-to-peer networking protocols that allow any connected device on the network to communicate.

“Because the market is just starting out, communications protocol is still an issue. But this is changing quickly,” he said.

“We are only about four or five years into the kind of wireless networking that would really enable this, and only about one or two years into the pervasiveness and the low cost of wireless networking that would make it economically practical,” Eunice said.

“We have Wi-Fi all over the place, but the kind of really practical, cheap networking that you would require to make these devices really talk to one another has only been available for a short time. So we are still in a very explosive growth stage.”

LEARN FROM THE KIDS
With all this technology exploding and changing all around us, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

“There was a time when people said, ‘I’m just waiting for this crazy period of my life to be over so I can get back to normal.’ But the first thing you have to understand is that this life is never going to get back to ‘normal,’ whatever that was,” Pulleyblank said. The key to it all might be in watching how young people interact with technology, he said.

The Internet has made a profound change in the last 10 years, but young people growing up in the information age see it differently. “To them it’s just a tool — they use it the way I would use a hammer.”

In the end, it is going to be impossible to say what will catch on and what will not, but Woodsworth said the younger generation will shape the success of what’s to come.

“Older guys like me, we are not as tuned in. I grew up with technology all my life — I was a techno-freak. But I wasn’t a kid when we had the Internet,” he said.

“ So, would I have predicted that Short Messaging Service (text messaging) would have taken off as ‘the thing’ that people want to do with their cellphones? I sure wouldn’t — I still don’t. I mean, who wants to type short messages with your thumbs? Well, it turns out a lot of people do,” Woodsworth said.

“I would have told you it’s a dumb idea and I would have completely missed the market that’s out there.”

So, does all this mean that our future will be bright, disease-free and fully wireless and automated? Will we have loads of free time to play with really cool electronic gadgets while we vacation on the moon? Or will it be more like some of the scarier sci-fi movies out there — the ones where people become virtual prisoners to malevolent computers while our water supply dwindles, our privacy becomes a thing of the past and our air becomes almost unbreathable? Everyone has theories, but the reality of it is that all of the above scenarios — in any number of combinations — are possible. Only time will tell.