On Technology
By Robert Scoble
I remember all the predictions of what the year 2000 would be like back when I was a kid in the 1970s. Fanciful flying cars. Weird kitchen gadgets. Living on Mars. All sorts of stuff that turned out to be, well, um, wrong.
So, now I’m thinking about 2032 and putting aside the fact that I’m not much more likely to be right than any of those attempts at predicting the future, let’s go. I do have some advantages in that I’ve hung out with many of the world’s great technologists and gotten their look into the future. The problem is no one really can accurately predict what life will be like further than about two years out, which is about how far out, say, Apple’s engineers are working on new product designs. Well, maybe Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the mouse, among other things) saw 21 years into the future, but then he’s a true visionary who sees things long before the rest of us do.
I’ve seen a few things that I’d like that already have been invented but haven’t been turned into products that are worth predicting will be products by 2032. Inside Microsoft Research, they have a screen that looks a lot like the one that Tom Cruise navigated on “Minority Report.” You manipulate images and text with your hands directly on the screen. Pretty cool stuff.
Today I’m already using Google’s Reader to tear through more than 1,000 RSS news items every day. That’s on top of Twitter bringing thousands of little notes from around the world to me. Mostly banal, but some very interesting. I’ll always remember the notes that told me there was a major earthquake happening in Mexico City AT THAT VERY MOMENT. Hours before CNN.
So, let’s take that out to 2032; we’ll have the ability to pull up live video from billions of cameras all over the world. Hear of a fire in a remote city? Point your eyes at a screen that’s being plugged directly into your eyes through a micro laser and think of the city name, think of news, think of fire, and up comes the live video from several different vantage points.
Newspapers? Nah, there are still one or two, but they are only for the super rich and old people who refuse to get one of the laser implants done in their eyes. But on the subways, electric ink is painted onto surfaces controlled by a little device that holds the keys to your life. So sit down and put your device onto a table, and your work spreads out from it. Pictures are there, you can drag them with your fingers.
In your home? You’ll have wrap-around screens that you can throw different video views of various events up on. Want to watch a baseball game? Sure, which of 97 cameras would you like to see the game through? How about a tiny one on the ball itself?
The earth will feel like a small village. Everyone will be able to see what everyone else is doing. And, probably, what they are thinking as well. Damn, I didn’t know you thought I was good looking. Let’s meet for pizza later. Oh, sorry, I know you already knew that.