Envisioning tomorrow.
Published by Esteban Glas on February 8th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: All this and that, long term thinking
I read this inspiring post at Markitude; and I couldn’t but let my imagination fly.
I wonder why we don’t get this same sense of vision Mark expresses Henry Ford had nowadays. Is it because we only perceive vision as such after it becomes a tangible reality or is it because we are lacking such vision? Is it because the massive amount of changes happening all around us blurs our perception, that things happen and change so fast that we can’t possibly try and predict what’s the future going to be like? Do we fear having visions in order not to look like class B 1950s SciFi movies look today?
PCs have shaped the world we live in today. We’d have no DVDs, no HD tv , no cell phones, and a lot of everyday appliances would be rather simple, for instance Microwave ovens would work on analogue timers, as they did in the 70’s. We’d still be using some form of tapes or vinyl discs (or whatever those would of evolved into if the CD had never appeared). Even science has taken huge advantage of computing power, even some “branches” have appeared thanks to chips being able to do a lot more maths that we would care to do (Chaos theory implications and arguments are based on millions of iterations, something that can’t be done manually).
Having a vision is fundamental to achieve great goals. Guy Kawasaki quotes Kennedy with his “we’ll put a man on the moon before the turn of the decade”. He went further and set both the goal and a time frame. Visions are never diffuse they are quite consistent and strict. “Computer business will change in the future” is not a vision, it’s just quoting the evident.
The other striking thing about visions is how absolutely simple and evident they look in retrospective; a man on the moon, a car for every one, a computer on every house; simple and strikingly obvious once they became true.
I feel visions have a lot to do with another thing I’m sort of obsessed about: long term thinking and slowing down. One can only envision something by profound thought and reflection. And those things take time. Even “illuminations” can only happen after aquiring deep knowledge on a particular subject.
I’ll take my chances and try my best in the “Futurology” subject; here’s a couple of things I envision for the future.
As PCs become cheaper and smaller we have integrated them into ever-shrinking gadgets. This trend is bound to continue. We’ll get processors into our toothbrushes in the future.
TV, Radio and web will be integrated in the not-so-distant-future. This will happen when someone comes up with an integration interface that requires as little effort as a common TV remote.
“Old School” Telephony is doomed. We’ll see it gone for good in the verge of the next 10 years in developed countries. It will take longer in third world countries, though.
Semi-conductor technology, which has taken us this far, will probably face a challenge when some other non-electrical (probably light) chip is invented. Silicon is starting to get to a point where it might not be physically possible to improve them the way we are used to. And the whole PC industry and derivatives rely on the ever increasing computing power extracted form used-to-be-sand.
Peak-Oil will become painfully evident. This will not evolve in the “doomsday - end of suburbia” way some people have foreseen, but rather it’ll affect our everyday lives and economies, forcing them to change in order to adapt to the “new reality”. And adapt we will. Once fossil oil becomes too expensive the switch to the next source of energy will happen faster than expected. What this source will be I don’t dare to say.
I don’t feel I’ve been very articulate for this post; maybe the explosion of thoughts was too much for me to handle.
6 Responses to “Envisioning tomorrow.”
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February 8th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Esteban,
Great Job. Let’s expand on a couple of your future concepts - take oil for instance. There are alternative fossil fuels - alcohol for one. The conversation can go a couple ways, two branches spring to mind. 1) Assume alternative synthetic fossile fuel can be created economically - Alcohol, or synthetic oil via Thermaldepolymerization, or what-have-you, will new sectors like Bio-tech leads these and replace big oil, or will big oil buy them out first? How does that play out? 2) Once some regions of the world are tapped out on oil, or we make a global change, how do their economies adapt? Do they become the next India / China, low cost, emerging high skill job markets? Do they take up manufacturing?
Lastly, let me pose something to ponder. In the last 2000 years, mankind has worked on technology in one form or fashion - defining time, making paper, harnessing the elements of wind and water, learning to navigate and define the shape of the world, mastering materials, harnessing the power of the atom, even leaving the planet. But all of this discovery is directed outward. Man still understands little of himself and what he really is. Medicine, still treats us as machinery - plumbing and chemistry. The mind is treated for what it is, an analog chemical computer. It can be reprogrammed through therapy, which creates new program connections, as does school or any education, or it can be affected chemically through drugs - prozac, lithium, thorazine, ridlin. What do we know of ourselves in 2000 years more than our own machinery?
I suggest that discovery of man’s true escence is indeed the final frontier, and one deserving of attention. But that thought thread is for another blog….
February 8th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
“Once fossil oil becomes too expensive the switch to the next source of energy will happen faster than expected. What this source will be I don’t dare to say.”
Because there isn’t one.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Mark,
You’ve hit a point I always think about. The analogy I usually use is: Athenians had Democracy 2000+ years ago, how come we learnt so much, we can fly, communicate across the globe, see stars a gazillion miles away but we have not evolved socially a single bit? Such discrepancy between “social progress” and “technological progress” is one of my (many) obsessions. Thanks for bringing it out.
As for energetic issues; I thin the only way to deal with it is efficiency, no matter what replaces Fossil oil (Bio diesel, alcohol, solar power, tidal power, whatever). I believe we could sustain the current standards of production and comfort using half the energy (globally). There are just so many “processes” that are inefficient just because energy is (was?) cheap that it’s amazing.
Barry, as for “no replacement”; maybe not yet, but never underestimate human’s power of invention and adaptation when in need.
This single post has fuelled another set of ideas to blog about…
February 9th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Whatever the replacement is, unless it was implemented 10 years ago, it ain’t gonna save us from a very uncomfortable period that will last at least a generation.
Think about the first computers, and how long it took to get one in most homes. How about high definition TV? 20 years. Now try to find a way to replace 200 million internal combustion engines and build 10,644 wind turbines and 47,289 hydrogen filling stations while the economy is crashing due to a lack of growth.
Maybe I should clarify my remark. There may be a replacement for fossil fuels, but it won’t arrive in time to fix our predicament. I may see it within my lifetime, but not before going through a very dark era.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
[...] Mark’s comment on my post on reply to his post got me thinking on a subject I have long wondered about. Our advances in terms of society and humanity as opposed to technical and technological advances. I have always wondered why this disparity exists, what are the reasons for us not to evolve in terms of society. [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
At risk of introducing yet another disruptive thread of discussion for Esteban to think about…..
Watching Matrix, Terminator, etc, I think over a lot of our science fiction that the message about how a purely logic based entity would view human kinds total activities. Here is a whole globe of organisms consuming resources, generating and transforming energy and materials to what end? Personal comfort? Personal gratification? Population growth? (We tend to reproduce and the planet population is growing - diseases, wars and natural disasters can only do so much to keep it in check).
Does human kind have a collective, common goal that it is working together as a collective to achieve? What % of all the daily energy, effort is direction to accomplishing a meaningful (to humanity as a whole) objective? That is in-effecient.
So, perhaps for our long term survival, at some point we are going to have to think about our roles as individuals within a specicies.
But then we can hijak the the discussion with the question that renders all the afore mentioned thinking completely irrelevant. Do we exist beyond this life? If so, does anything we do here affect that trajectory? Ultimately, based on the answers there, all the rest should be decided. But, that’s the hard one, isn’t it. There is not provable answer, and there are about a zillion different takes on it and people trying to lead people based on belief.