A quick note: last month’s 20th anniversary newsletter appears to have bounced off different organization’s content filters in both long-form text and Word attachment formats. It’s here if you missed it.
10 years ago, after doing a retrospective in October, I looked ahead in November. What did I think would matter in 2017? The short answer: cloud computing, handsets/smartphones, health (including concerns about cellphone radiation), IoT, security issues, a dialectic between attention-gathering and privacy, new human-computer interfaces, education, crowds, and technology-mediated emotional connection. Going in order, what happened?
Cloud computing: Amazon Web Services became a profit engine for the otherwise low-margin Seattle mega-retailer. Microsoft chose a new CEO based in large measure on his ability to lead the company to a cloud-centric future. Adobe and other software companies went all-in on software as a subscription.
Score: Hit
Handsets/smartphones: Facebook on smartphones has become an essential utility for more than a billion people. Apple and Google deposed global smartphone giants Nokia and Rim in a matter of a few quarters. Television viewed on smart devices is reshaping entire industries: “There's little question as to demand, particularly after seeing adoption in Japan and Korea, but allocating the money may prove to be difficult.” That last bit is an understatement: ESPN, to name one content provider caught in the middle, has laid off hundreds of staffers (the most recent wave was this week) as TV economics continue to be rewritten.
Score: Hit
Health: Radiation concerns never really slowed adoption. Electronic medical records are by no means universal. South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius (who I mentioned) made the news, but not for his famous carbon-fiber legs. Digital prosthetics, including exoskeletons, are progressing, but not yet widely adopted.
Score: Miss
IoT: “All told, there are dozens of billions of items that can connect and combine in new ways.” Indeed there are.
Score: Hit
Security concerns: The TJMaxx security failure, which I noted had leaked 47 million credit card numbers, feels quaint alongside the massive breaches at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (22 million records related to background checks), Yahoo (3 billion email logins), and Equifax (147 million credit ratings and related data). In addition, the IoT vulnerabilities that have emerged with everything from baby monitors to Jeep Cherokees constitute an entire new front in the battle for secure computing.
Oh, and saying “one must assume viruses will attack . . . powerplant controls” anticipated the Stuxnet worm, first uncovered in 2010.
Score: Hit
A dialectic between attention-gathering and privacy
“Who owns my trail of digital breadcrumbs that everyone from Axciom and Amazon to Vodaphone and Yahoo is trying to use for commercial purposes?” The short answer has emerged: Google and Facebook. Everyone from iRobot (the new Internet-connected Roomba sends maps of your floorpan to the mothership for monetization) to cable and wireless providers is trying to capture their share of the market.
Score: Hit
New human-computer interfaces
No it wasn’t haptics or electrodermal technologies, and OLED and e-ink aren’t really earth-shattering, but the Alexa/Siri/Cortana gold rush validates the prediction.
Score: Hit
Education
“How do schools prepare young people for jobs and organizational designs that have yet to be invented?” Answer: Not very well. The MOOC fad has yet to converge into a stable isotope, Khan Academy is important but still a small player, and Lynda is a feature within LinkedIn which is owned by Microsoft. No Google or Amazon-scale player has emerged.
Score: Miss
Crowds
“Clay Shirky has suggested that flame wars are essentially inevitable outcomes, rather than side effects, of social software. . . . Given that more people will be in contact with more people in new ways, how will new rules of behavior take shape? Will the lack of interpersonal civility (exemplified in the golden age of the ad hominem attack, offline and on-) evolve? If so, in which direction?” Said behavior is shaping politics in the US, UK, Italy, and France, to name a few. It’s safe to say this is a big deal.
Score: Hit
Technology-mediated emotional connection
Forget dancing with earbuds rather than to speakers, people naming their Roomba, and even the reduction in teenage inhibition when texting rather than talking: Facebook has 1.4 billion people who check in _every day_. Another 700 million log in at least monthly.
Score: Hit
Here’s the original newsletter for reference, edited for space considerations:
As promised last month, here are ten information-technology-related areas to watch over the next ten years. Rather than attempting to be systematic, this list will merely suggest topic areas and point to some relevant data points; otherwise, a ten-item list would soon get unwieldy.
1) The New Physical Layer
Although everything from power grids to bridges and ports to railways is being built or rebuilt, our focus here is on computing and networking. In particular, power and bandwidth will be transformed in the next decade.
Taking power first, cloud computing vendors are waging an arms race as they build data centers to power a range of offerings loosely called "web services." Because of the intensity of their power consumption, these often appear near cheap hydroelectric power sources (which themselves may be affected by global climate changes). It's estimated, for example, that Google's data center, housed in two adjacent buildings in Oregon, contains 1.3 million computing cores on 9,000 racks per structure, and photographs of the cooling towers are staggering.
Something else is going on: Caterpillar reported that its Q2 07 revenues from sales of backup generators, such as those used in data centers, were up 41% at a time when overall U.S. construction equipment sales are slumping. The growth of "cloud computing" feels as though it's related to the trend toward virtualization, where resources can be located, physically and/or logically, away from their locus of deployment.
2) Enmeshed
The distinction between telephones and PCs is getting fuzzier every year, as we have noted, and the iPhone presents a clear case in point: running a Unix variant, it can be spoken at, but performs best moving and manipulating images and data. Mobile phones, ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), gaming devices including Nokia's N-Gage, handheld PCs, televisions, and other devices (such as standalone GPS trackers) will continue to converge.
Television over mobile handsets is estimated to reach over 100 million users by 2009, and the number should soar further in conjunction with the 2010 World Cup. Expect to see spirited competition among content owners like News Corp, handset manufacturers, network equipment firms (including heavyweights Qualcomm, Nokia, and potentially Intel), and carriers such as Vodaphone and T-Mobile. Finally, given that [lots of] advertising is involved, expect something unexpected from Google. There's little question as to demand, particularly after seeing adoption in Japan and Korea, but allocating the money may prove to be difficult.
3) Healthy, Wealthy, and Wired
Entire books need to be written on various facets of information, technology, and health. A few bullets suggest the reach of potential issues:
-Electronic medical records have the potential to improve care, save money, and enhance the patient's experience with his or her health care system. EMRs also could help transform the economics of health insurance, lead to data breaches of untold pain and economic impact, and alter the role of physicians relative to insurers, employers, and patients. Automating the current, broken U.S. system (I can't speak for other countries), feels unappealing, which means that implementing EMRs implies deeper transformation, parallel to but much bigger than the changes brought about by corporate ERP implementations.
-What does it mean to be human? Mechanical joints and prostheses are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and digitized. When does a disability become an unfair advantage? Oscar Pistorius is a South African sprinter whose 400 meter time is about a second slow of Olympic qualifying. He's also a double amputee whose carbon-fiber "legs" are challenging old ideas about fair competition.
-What will be the long-term effects of nearfield electromagnetic emissions, particularly after they have been focused through the ear directly into people’s brains? Cell phone antennas are a potential hazard, but so are earbuds and Bluetooth radios, and nobody knows yet what might or could happen across broad populations with widely varying spectrum allocations, cultural patterns, and governmental regulations.
4) Connection Machines
As more kinds of things get connected to information networks, the potential for unexpected consequences gets ever more interesting to contemplate. Just listing the number of classes of devices that can or will soon interoperate gives a sense of scale:
-telephones, the wireless variety of which can be understood as beacons, bar-code scanners, and network nodes - potentially in a mesh configuration
-computers
-thermostats
-motor- and other industrial controllers
-vehicles
-surveillance cameras (of which there are over 2,000 in Chicago alone)
-sensors, whether embedded in animals, affixed to pharmaceutical packaging, or attached to engine components to predict mechanical failure.
All told, there are dozens of billions of items that can connect and combine in new ways.
5) Virtual Fences
It's extremely difficult to delimit this space. Risk, trust, identity, and security are all intertwined, and each has implications for the others. At base, the questions of "who are you," "can you prove it," and "who else knows your information" are all in play, all over the world.
Given the numbers of networked devices listed above, one must assume viruses will attack everything from powerplant controls to cellphone networks to several types of security systems.
The biggest data breach I'm aware of is the 47 million credit-card numbers lost by TJX (parent company to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods) as a result of improperly configured in-store wireless networks.
6) Of Memory and Forgetting
Many questions relating to monetization of data are relevant here. Who owns my trail of digital breadcrumbs that everyone from Axciom and Amazon to Vodaphone and Yahoo is trying to use for commercial purposes? In healthcare, who holds, owns, and controls my lifelong record of prescriptions (filled and unfilled), medical test results, over-the-counter and supplement purchases (helpfully recorded by loyalty cards), public health data, and even caloric intake and, at the health club, expenditure?
7) The Human Peripheral
Traditionally, people connected to the computer through punch tapes or cards, keyboards, and screens. That list is getting longer, quickly.
-Haptics
It's been five years already since Cambridge and MIT researchers shook hands across the Atlantic. Haptic (3-D touch-based) interfaces are entering the mass market, most visibly via the Nintendo Wii, which is outselling conventional game consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
-Electrodermal
Vyro has developed a Bluetooth device about the size of a gum eraser. It measures stress through sweat gland activity in the skin, so one application is a clever game in which two players race their cars on a Bluetooth phone, the winner being the one who's more relaxed.
-New screens
Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology is coming to market soon, in Sony televisions for instance. Compared to LCD, OLED is brighter, more power efficient, and thinner - but it reacts badly to water. E-ink and other flexible displays are making similar progress.
8) Education
How do schools prepare young people for jobs and organizational designs that have yet to be invented? To take two current examples, where did today's generation of sushi chefs and yoga teachers get their training? Where will robot mechanics, Internet addiction counselors, and Chinese lawyers get started? Getting computers (possibly through One Laptop Per Child or Project Inkwell) to the masses will start a process but by no means finish it.
As online course delivery ramps up, questions arise about architecture: what should a virtually-enabled classroom look like? Where should schools be built, particularly in developing environments? What should they look like? What is the role and function of a public library in a world in which the place of print is in major upheaval?
9) {Your Theme Here}
As blogging, social networking, and user-generated content proliferate, we're seeing one manifestation of a larger trend toward delegitimization of received cultural authority. Instead of trusting politicians, professional reviewers, or commercial spokespeople, many people across the world are putting trust in each other's opinions: Zagat is a great example of formal ratings systems being challenged by masses of uncredentialed, anonymous diners. Zagat also raises the issue of when crowds can be "wise," cannot possibly be "wise," or generally do not matter one way or the other.
Clay Shirky has suggested that flame wars are essentially inevitable outcomes, rather than side effects, of social software. Many blogs have comments turned off because of abuse that simply takes too long to monitor and manage. Given that more people will be in contact with more people in new ways, how will new rules of behavior take shape? Will the lack of interpersonal civility (exemplified in the golden age of the ad hominem attack, offline and on-) evolve? If so, in which direction?
10) Silicon Emotion
People are interacting with other people with multiple layers of computing and communications in between. The nature of emotional expression is changing as a result.
-Dancing alone
What does it mean when tens of millions of music lovers listen in isolation, through headphones, rather than in rooms, or concert halls?
-Inhibition deficiency
In addition to flaming, people will say things electronically they would be much more hesitant to articulate verbally. Watching teenagers IM each other fluently and unabashedly, then stand with each other awkwardly after school, is a fascinating exercise. In the Nordics, the second-most prevalent use of text messaging (after coordination), is "grooming" - flirting.
-Robot love
The Roomba has inspired tremendous affection in its brief lifetime. (See the fascinating paper by Ja-Young Sung, Lan Guo, Rebecca E. Grinter, and Henrik I. Christensen, all of Georgia Tech, entitled "'My Roomba is a Rambo': Intimate Home Appliances" for compelling evidence on this point.)
***
One final word: ten years is probably too long a time horizon for some of these areas, but institutional change, in education for instance, is always the slow part that will balance out some of the blink-of-an-eye things we’re about to witness.
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