A mad, ostentatious future
Remember what people thought the world would look like now, in 1959? If they’d been right, we’d be flying cars and living on the moon. Predicting the gadgets we’ll be drooling over 50 years from now is just as tricky.
But it’s what my editor at T3 asked me to do, so…
The big hairy problem is that while progress usually shuffles along predictably – a bigger screen here, better battery life there – really big steps forward come from disruptive innovations. They’re the ones that creep up and catch clever people out.
Talking about computers in 1943, IBM’s chairman said: “There is a world market for maybe five.”
That was before some bright spark made them smaller than a house and able to run games.
Bill Gates’s response to the internet in 1993? “Not interested.”
It isn’t just clever people who get caught out though. Who in the 1980s thought mobile phones were anything but a tool for braying Yuppies?
A 1980s Yuppie with mobile phone
That email wasn’t just a geek’s way of getting in touch in the early 90s?
“If you’re looking for tomorrow’s big ‘un,” says Jonathan Margolis, the FT How to Spend It techspert. “It’s probably the stuff that sounds unremarkable, ostentatious or mad right now.”
Here’s one mad idea: no more gadgets.
“If by gadget you mean discrete, single-purpose high-technological devices, they’ll be gone,” says Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction.
In his book Everyware, Greenfield describes a future, not far from now, when computing power will be so powerful and cheap it’ll be installed everywhere. There are two important results of this. One, your fridge will outsmart you and, two, there’ll be a ubiquitous network.
Then, gadgets will be commoditised tools that tap into that network. We won’t care about the best gadget anymore – it’ll all be about the latest killer app.
By 2059, there’ll be other things missing too, like wires. They’ll only exist in the Museum of the Computer (which will also keep keyboards, PCs and joysticks – remember those?).
Wireless will mean electricity then too. Using Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), scientists at Intel can already power a 60-watt light bulb– that’s more power than most laptops use today.
Instead of touch screens, we’ll communicate with the network through 3D motion sensors –
similar to the way Scientology Tom does in Minority Report.
By 2059, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might have taken over. They’re already in the formative stage. Take Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset. Currently in Beta, it can identify 30 different brainwave patterns to tell a game what the player wants to do.
Tapping this idea, Margolis thinks we’ll be using Life Recorders in the 2050s. They’ll record everything we see, hear and do. Pay for the 2059 upgrade and they’ll record your dreams and auto-upload them to 3Dreamtube.
That’ll be competing with 2059’s other piece of must-have tech: Intel’s ShapeShifter, which the company is already working on. Still in its early stages, it’ll be made up of microscopic robots called “catoms” which collectively change their arrangement to become something else.
By 2059, your catomised mobile device will instantly morph into a coffee cup, a paper-thin OLED screen, a birthday card, a Darth Vader mask… whatever you want it to be. If that doesn’t sound mad and ostentatious, I don’t know what does.
