Saturday 8 October 2005

Pic of the day: An ever smaller world.

The near future, again

I recently read (in a business newspaper, of all places) about a study in Memphis, it showed that 20% of young people started chewing nicotine gum without taking the detour of cigarettes. I'm sure this surprised some people, but I had already predicted this development in a journal entry in 2001. On the other hand, in that same journal entry I predicted the rise of WebCams in the place of journals, which has hardly happened so far, but failed to predict the mass spread of blogging. It is not like I have divine revelations about the future, just common sense. (Except, as we know, common sense is not all that common...)

So here are my guesses for the next 10 years, if we manage to not blow ourselves up:

***

The growth of microprocessor power is coming to an end, more or less, even as I speak. Not because of the laws of physics, but economics. Instead new processors will use less electricity and produce less heat. And they will be made to cooperate. Dual-kernel processors will become the norm, unless we get an even more flexible architecture that lets you add more kernels. Also, grid computing will become widespread even for private use: Tasks that don't need to be done immediately will be "farmed out" to cheap processors either on your own home network or on the Internet. The time-critical tasks will generally be the interface between the computer and the human. And one of the most demanding of those tasks will be speech recognition. This technology will gradually replace the keyboard. Already today speech recognition software is able to take dictation almost as well as a college student, if the room is quiet. (In fact, I am dictating this entry in that way.) The next step will be technology that filters out distracting sounds, including other voices, so speech-recognition can be used almost anywhere.

The datapad, the successor to the PDA, should become a reality somewhere between 2010 and 2015. We may still have a couple iterations of Pocket PC and handheld games consoles and advanced mobile phones before they finally merge. The existence of the datapad depends above all on almost unlimited bandwidth. Only the interface functions will be located in the actual pad, while storage and database functions will be elsewhere: Either at your home/office, or somewhere else on the Internet. The pad will probably be most used for entertainment and for looking up random facts when you suddenly feel the need for it. It will have all the functions of a personal computer today and then some. And you will definitely speak to it, because dragging a keyboard around just doesn't make sense. (Of course you can also use handwriting on its surface if there are things you don't want to say out loud.)

Once speech recognition has reached almost human levels, it will become an integrated part of everything we do. The technology will not be integrated into every object such as cars, light switches and microwave ovens. (Okay, perhaps cars.) But for the most part it will stay in the datapad, which again will communicate with the objects around us. It will realize from context which object we are talking to: It seems unlikely that we will ask the microwave to "play again that song by Dire Straits which I played yesterday or the day before", so that request will be redirected to the stereo even if we are not facing that way. When in doubt, just preface the command or question with the name of the object: "Kitchen lights, turn off!" If in doubt, it will simply ask. Of course, as the system gradually learns our habits, we will no longer need to say everything. Some things go without saying when you know someone well enough...

***

In economics and politics, we have some rough years ahead. The USA has closed its eyes to reality far too long already. The bills will come due, and they are huge. The Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the US, has been inching the interest rates upward for some time already. As a result, property prices in the largest cities are starting to actually fall. When this trend spreads, the middle class will no longer be able to borrow against their homes to finance other expenses. This will reveal a rather disturbing fact about the economic boom for the last 15 years: It was not really real. First there was a bubble in the stock market, then this was immediately replaced with a bubble in the property market. If you look at the hourly wages, they have barely risen at all. People have not grown richer, they have just spent more money. Well, the tax breaks have made them a little richer, but this too is borrowed money, only by the government.

One of two things may happen soon: Either the Americans wake up and start saving, or the rest of the world wakes up and stops lending. In any case, factories around the world will no longer be able to export as much as they used to. They will have to find new markets or close down. The new markets will not be as rich, so anyway profit will be squeezed. This in turn will hurt the producers of raw materials such as oil, metal and wood. The current period of worldwide growth will most likely be replaced by a period of stagnation.

This stagnation will not stop the advances in technology and design. The experience from Japan for more than a decade now shows that improvement in quality continues even in stagnation or recession. So new goods will be better than the old ones, but people will be more cautious about buying them.

The USA will not continue to ascend higher and higher above the other nations, but neither will it suddenly fall to the bottom of the heap. Even though it is isolated politically and weakened economically, there is still no other contender for the position of superpower. The European Union will continue to grow as a confederation rather than merge into one "supernation". China still has a long way to go even if it can keep up its current growth, and the same goes even more for India, Indonesia and Brasil.

All over the world a new generation is seeping into politics. They grew up seeing pictures of the Earth from space, a blue sphere without the artificial border lines of conventional maps. They communicate regularly with people from different nations over the Internet and count some of these people among their friends. While this new generation is as vulnerable to conspiracy theories as anyone, they are less likely to accept propaganda about nations. Nationalism as we know it may finally be on its way out, at least in the most developed nations.