Holway's 'Shape of Things to Come'

Yesterday I posted my Whizz through the decades of ICT as I had presented at the start of the Prince’s Trust ICT Leaders of the Last 40 Years Dinner on 5th Oct 16.

I ended my part of the evening with my predictions for the future as follows:

A few months ago I was introduced as the one analyst who had regularly and accurately ‘predicted the future’. Actually predicting what was going to happen in the next 1-5 years I have found to be extremely difficult. But the next 20 years is a bit easier as everything that will become mainstream in 20+ years time is around today. Just turn the clock back to 1995 and you will see what I mean.

You just have to pick the winners from the losers remembering that Technology has a wonderful way of making things cheaper, smaller, faster and more efficient.

By 2036, I really do reckon that the auto sector will have been transformed. Indeed I think that autoTECH will create perhaps the biggest opportunity – certainly the biggest disruption – that we have ever seen and much bigger than smartphones. Cars, trucks, buses etc will have many autonomous features and certain roads and parts of Cities will be exclusively used by self-driving cars. Indeed cars with drivers might be considered as dangerous and anti-social as smoking  today!

Vehicles using fossil fuels will be banned and most will be electric with battery technology enabling ranges many times those of today

Renewable energy will generate the vast majority of our energy needs. Solar will be like Moore’s Law and halve in cost and double in power each year. Battery technology, like Elon Musk’s Powerwall, will enable even the smallest house to store all the power it needs – including recharging the family car – if indeed we still need a car in 2036. I actually think we will just summon a car when we need it rather than keeping it on the drive unused for 95% of the time.

AI and automation will change most white collar jobs – including my own as an analyst! Just like it has changed blue collar roles in the last 40 years.

Augmented Reality will be a big hit and, when linked with Haptics, will revolutionise entertainment. Rather than seeing things on a flat screen, you will have an entertainment room at home where you be immersed in the experience – seeing, hearing and feeling things exactly as if you were there. This will be a particular big hit in pornography!

Wearable devices will have a huge range of sensors and will be particularly useful in healthcare. Your RoboDoctor will inform you that you are just about to have a heart attack and your self-driving Uber ambulance is on the way to take you to hospital – where, let’s hope, you will not have to wait 4 hours in A&E!

Whether it will be a better, happier world as a result – I will leave to you. But one thing I can predict is that if you think the last 40 years have been exciting for TECH, Well You ain’t seen nothing yet!

Posted by Richard Holway at '00:00'