Ten years ago today, I was getting ready to experience my first New Year's celebration in Canada. If anyone from Citizenship & Immigration is reading this, can you please find out where the heck my citizenship has gotten to?! I took my test almost a year ago and I've heard nothing despite chasing you a number of times! I still don't know if I passed or failed even! I would like to pledge allegiance to the Queen (despite the irony of the fact that she was my Queen before she was yours given my British Heritage) and get my Canadian passport and so that I can actually get some value from my hard earned tax money you keep taking from me every pay cheque and actually voice my opinions at the polling stations! If you could get on that, I'd be most appreciative - it really sucks that I have to pay so much for something I have no right to vote about.
Now that's out of the way - where has technology gone in the last 10 years? Well, I recall days of trying to convince bosses that email on everyone's desk was a good idea and that internet access for all the developers in the company would actually make them more productive. That was a long hard fight. Today developers can barely function if the internet goes down and like most of them, I find it hard too. Thank god I can afford to line my bookshelves with the most up to date books so that if I can't waste time on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or any number of other social distractions I can still work. Actually, now I think about it, I start to wonder if my boss at the time was actually right.
While the internet has become the backbone of most of our every day lives and has gone from strength to strength in terms of performance - now most of the free world has access to broadband I wonder where we're going from here.
Where will we be ten years from now? The "cloud" is picking up speed and looks like it will become synonymous with the internet. Service based applications that were touted to be the next big thing ten years ago are only just starting to become serious contenders as people have started to wrap their heads around the possibility of accessing their data from anywhere via any type of device they choose in the moment - especially as the performance of mobile devices picks up.
My prediction for the coming decade is that mobile devices will become so integrated into our lives that we will have a single mobile device that will be capable of handling our entire mobile life - from paying for your coffee at Starbucks to complete mobile access to information, visual and verbal communication, GPS, traffic, music. We're already close - the iPhone and Blackberry are almost there, in fact, they'd likely be there already if they weren't so hell bent on keeping everyone else out of their APIs. Although, maybe financial companies will actually wise up and quit using these stupid pin pads you see everywhere that can still be hacked and instead use fingerprint or iris recognition or something that can't be lost, stolen or hacked - an in the meantime actually make my life easier because then I can forget about remembering the PINs for dozen cards in my wallet.
In the home, I predict that we'll finally be able to have our home media centers set up the way we want instead of the way the Cable or Satellite providers dictate we must have them. If you're reading this Satellite and Cable providers, read my previous blog post and take heed of my rant about your ridiculous policies that force me to interact with my TV in a way that is completely retarded.
I believe that ten years from now, technology will be far less painful to use than it is today. When they say "plug it in and it'll just work", we might actually be able to believe that will happen - because today when you say that, as a developer I have to roll my eyes and say "Whatever". I think our lives will revolve a lot less around our computers - instead our lives will revolve around us living and our computers will do what they're supposed to - handle all the crap we don't want to deal with - like having to run around the house and make sure all the lights are off before we go to bed, that the door is locked, that the garage is closed, it will make sure the heating is on or off and the temperature is set correctly so I don't have to figure out the stupid thermostat for the 15th time this month. It will look after the pool for me so I don't have to worry about whether the chemicals are balanced, the cover is on or off, the water is topped up to the right level and that it's clean enough to use. While much of this is available today, most of the market lives quite happily without it - wasting time on tasks they hadn't considered could be completely automated. I believe this has largely to do with the prohibitive costs or the complexity in setting it up.
What else do I think we'll see in the next 10 years?...
- The way we interact and search for information on the internet will be augmented or change dramatically. We will interact with it in a more natural manner.
- As the performance of mobile devices increases and integration of positioning devices such as accelerometers, GPS, compasses, thermometers etc, we will start to see augmented reality becoming popular.
- We've yet to really see information overload, although we've complained of it. In the next ten years, as the internet extends our reality in a more natural manner our ability to learn and interact with our environment will be changed in ways we can only begin to imagine.
- As facial tracking and recognition software improves, we could look at someone and have access to all their tweets, blog posts, Facebook profile, resume, LinkedIn profile in a display of some kind - a contact lens perhaps?
- Thought control of our devices giving us access to information just by thinking about it.
When it comes to technology, we are truly living in an exciting time. Imagine being able to look at someone, having our mobile device recognize them and then just by thinking "blog" we've got that displaying in our augmented reality contact lens, or checking their resume. Or we can call someone just by thinking about talking to them, their avatar shows up projected in front of us by our augmented reality lens - we could interact in a manner similar to Twitter in a virtual office space interacting with a group that aren't even there - except on our contact lens. The mind boggles at the possibilities that we're already on the cusp of producing.
I don't think that we'll see the ability to implant thoughts in people's heads though. It would be truly great if Matrix style, you could load a program in your mind and suddenly you're able to do something - like fly a plane, do complex math and understand things you couldn't understand before. Imagine where science would go then - if scientists had immediate access and understanding of everything they need to as a result of a single thought, then what as a race are we capable of? I think as our understanding of the human mind advances this will become possible, but while I'd be over the moon to see this in the next ten years, I don't think that's probable - perhaps in the next 50.
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