As we are closing the chapter on another early year in the 21st century, I have some thoughts about what to expect from the technologies that arrive next year and what we might possibly see beyond that.
As a Microsoft Regional Director for Norway and a Technology Leader in Capgemini Norway, one of my tasks is to be up-to-date on technology, trends, and changes and also help my fellow friends and co-workers to adapt to the ever changing world around us.
So here follows some of my (unstructured) thoughts about the history so far and what advances we might see in the coming years.
The 20th Century was an era that spawned the digital revolution in the 1980s and 1990s with the birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
In the beginning of the 21st century, the IT industry was hit pretty badly by the DotCom bubble and many individuals are seeing some of the same trends in today’s market where many industries are seeing an incredible upturn. I don’t think we have never seen such low unemployment rates in Norway ever before, which is now down to 2,6%.
Oil has been an important fuel for the economy in 20th century and we are facing the potential consequences of our previous actions with unstable weather conditions around the globe and a melting north pole. Well, I personally don’t believe the global warning is directly related to the pollution introduced by human-being, but a normal cycle of the world; it is still a problem that we will have to face one way or the other.
Pollution and resource depletion have received very high focus in research and media in the past years and the severity will continually increase as we will see more and more natural disasters hitting every continent where hundreds of millions of people are living.
Many people are promoting the ways of being sparser with resources, both for business and for personal use. I try my best to contribute to the efforts of recycling and staying healthy and well.
But there is always a but: We need to ensure we do not let these actions stop or halt the innovation and advances that is required for technology to progress.
It’s the technologies of the 21st century that has the potential of changing everything around and not only so – but to radically change the very life’s of every one of us.
You have probably read enough about the promises behind bioengineering, nanotechnologies and other advanced research. These areas have for a while underachieved in the same ways as artificial intelligence did when the pioneers started out back in 1956.
We celebrated A.I.’s 50 years anniversary last year. Even though we are still far away from the dreams and promises made in the early days, the fruits we are ripping are already very amazing and have impacted millions of people’s lives and more every day.
Robotics is another field in which I have a lot of interest, and I also have invested a lot of my spare time doing projects and research on it. This is the single most important area to watch out for in the future and I promise you all that robotics will transform the life of yours and mine. Let me get back to this topic after some other thoughts.
While the work done on A.I. has taken a long time to come to where we are today, it mainly depends on one single technology:
The power and speed of the central processing unit (CPU).
Technology is something that does not following the normal pattern of improvement; it follows a trend of exponential growth. What this means is that we are seeing doubling in many different aspects of technology and its use in products.
Your laptop is now many times faster than a supercomputer back in the old days (some decades ago). A few years from now, your new laptop will be many times faster than what you have today.
Yesterday Intel marked the 60th anniversary of the transistor, which is the foundation of modern day technologies.
So before we move on you should watch this history of Intel CPU video that is made by the Gadget.com crew and see how everything have progressed the last 60 years.
There is a future event that is predicted and called the Technological Singularity (or The Spike) which is a hypothesized creation of an entity (through A.I. or some other means) that is vastly intelligent to humans. While there are many important individuals to be mentioned in this regard, I would like to point out Ray Kurzweil who’s written many great books on the subject of exponential growth.
I won’t go into any more details about it; let me continue my thoughts on the current times and the future.
We saw the birth of the Internet just a few years ago and it is now available to anyone who has the right equipment to connect to it. What the Internet represents might not be truly understood by most of us, and we probably never fully grasp it. As we will never truly understand how we are able to fly into the space and visit the Moon and soon Mars.
But it’s here (Internet) and all of our lives are depending on it. When something happens to the infrastructure of the Net and an office or a whole city, region or country loses its connection to the rest of the world – people are starting to walk around like zombies out of a fresh grave. Many of us who work as consultants are often very much dependent on the network to be up and running 24/7 with the downtime as low as possible. We have all our e-mails, documents, applications and services running up in the sky and if someone is unlucky and pulls your plug, your brain becomes an empty shell with nothing to do (Please note that I’m taking this example to the extreme, but this will soon be the reality).
As we are getting more wired up to the Internet through or mobile phones, our music and video players, watches, clothes and even glasses – the dependency on always being online and having the latest information available will be more crucial. But this is only something that you will imagine, because it’s a drug and we are all addicted to it. We are abusing our lives and precious time by using spending numerous hours on social networks like MySpace, FaceBook, Second Life and playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games like World of Warcraft. And writing useless personal e-mails and chatting online with people you have never meet and probably will never meet. Why do we do all of this and all those other things to make the day pass? Because it gives us personal enjoyment and experiences.
Experiences I say? But we don’t even have time for that any longer. My Xbox 360 is dusting down as I keep working myself out of tighter schedules and important meetings and tasks. How can we get more time for fun and pleasure?
While we have waited 50 years on A.I. research to come through, we will not have to wait that long for the technologies of the future. The progress we have experience in 2007 might only take 6 months in 2008 for the same amount of achievement. As a Microsoft Regional Director I’m very interested in the products and technologies that Microsoft is working on and three very important releases in the early 2008 is of course Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. All of these products are bringing advantages which will be the foundation for further growth in 2008 and beyond.
Maybe those products sounds pretty boring to some of you, there are of course other interesting products like Microsoft Surface which is a platform for multi-touch tables. While others have demonstrated the ability to handle multiple inputs, Microsoft is working on a framework that will spawn innovation into this area of research and product development.
The same basic idea is what has driven Microsoft from its beginning – enabling people to live out their dreams and visions. Which is the heart behind the Web 2.0 era that we are currently experience, with the user (you) being the driving force behind all of it.
Did you recognize who was Person of the Year in Time Magazine this year? You! Why? Because you’re the one driving the Internet forward with user contributed content on sites like FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg and who knows what kind of services will appear tomorrow morning.
While Surface is still on the drawing board, it’s been more than a year since Microsoft released Microsoft Robotics Studio which is a platform that unifies the tools and hardware to build robots and machine automation.
Bill Gates wrote an important article about a robot in every home, in the Scientific American, where he explains his thoughts on the robotics industry as it is today and how it is in many ways similar to how the computer industry was back when he started Microsoft. But it doesn’t require rocket science brain to figure out that it won’t take as long for this industry to advance much faster and grow bigger than anything imaginable today.
But, here is another but; The Robots is among us already. Production factories are heavily dependent on them, the car industry has used them for as long as they have existed and they are slowly moving into your living room. As you can read in the article that I just linked, they even save marriages.
And here follows the only quote I have in this post:
"What is about to happen is totally unprecedented: a second intelligent species is poised to appear," he says.
It’s not only unprecedented; it’s unexpected, unknown, unstoppable and most of all – incredible (the robotic revolution)!
My prediction for the near future is that robots will change your life forever and in so many ways you can’t even imagine. With the birth of a general purpose humanoid robot that can do every day normal task for you and me, then the race is on. As humans we will be required to find new and challenging jobs that our robots can’t do yet. But this will be a race that we will lose in the end.
Robots will do everything for us; they will tutor us, they will feed us, they will build our homes and cars (as they do today). They will transport us to where we need to be. They will be able to carry enormous weights and execute dangerous tasks perfectly without requiring any payment.
So you need to ask yourself: Are you prepared, how will you avoid getting replaced by a robot?
(End Notes: Nobody can predict the future but we can look at trends and think of possible scenarios that has a high probability of being realized. I do hope that the transition will be as smooth as possible and I hope we can all get more free time in the future that we can enjoy with our friends and families.
Why would you need to have a job in the future, when everything is produced for free and from clean energy from our Sun?)