Too many lists!

The world of social media is littered with lists. There are lists for leaders, lists for motivators, lists for technologists, and even lists for haters of lists. Most of these lists claim to be definitive and declare themselves to be facts. The worst of these lists are the ones that predict the future. And so in the spirit of having too many lists that predict the future, here’s my contribution.

This blog post has been prompted by a look back at a tweet from seven years ago by @ForbesTech. It listed the top 5 disruptive technologies that “will shape the future”. Their list was as follows:

1. The sharing economy (e.g. Uber)
2. Cloud computing
3. Digital supply chain
4. 3D printing
5. Internet of things

My immediate response to this list was that these weren’t technologies of the future. They are very much with us in 2015. That led me to consider which five technologies were the ones to watch over the next ten years. Having considered this for at least ten minutes I tweeted “IMO it’s robotics, implantables, life prolonging drugs, and fast charge batteries. Blog post coming…”, and thus committed to justifying myself.

So, seven years later, here I am, writing about the past and future.

Look into my crystal ball

The first thing to note is that, just like everyone else, I’m guessing, but guessing leads to discussion. Discussion then leads to argument which leads to new thinking, and that’s what I’m really interested in.

So, for clarity, my list is:

1. Artificial Intelligence & Robotics
2. Implantables
3. Genetic medicine
4. Fast charge batteries

AI & robotics – back in 2015 there was a NASA robotics competition which prompted everyone to joke about the fact that robots couldn’t even open doors. Fast forward to 2018 and a Boston Robotics video showing robots opening doors for each other goes viral. Now, in 2022, they’re doing parkour. The simple truth is if you state robots can’t do something, someone will make them do it, but this is not the point. The real future in robotics is not about replacing humans. It’s about automating the things we use to make our lives easier, and augmenting our natural abilities with things we find difficult.

Implantables – it’s about convenience. Making the technology part of who we are. An evolution from the clunky world of machines that make us work their way, to devices that allow us to use touch, gesture and voice. Solutions that interface with us in the way we naturally interact with the real world. I blogged about this, here: https://jonayre.uk/blog/2022/09/14/implants-and-the-augmented-human/

Genetic medicine – it’s about being healthy and lasting longer. It’s inevitable. In my grandfather’s youth antibiotics didn’t exist, and neither did the national health service. If you got a bit sick, you died. The idea of being ill was a universally accepted reality. Nowadays, ill health is a relative rarity in western society, and that which is unfamiliar is also frightening, and must be eliminated. More and more, the problems left to solve are printed into our DNA. Recent advances open the door to creation of new treatments, and the creation of biologically sympathetic products.

Fast charge batteries – Mobile devices are everywhere and electric vehicles soon will be. Our need for power on the go has created a demand for better battery technologies. This in turn has triggered an explosion in research and development focused on energy storage technologies. The tipping point will come when a battery can achieve the holy trinity of miniaturisation, long life, and near-instant charging. Out of this will spring a new generation of technical solutions.

The sum of the parts

We can all make lists of emerging technologies, but they’re not predictions of disruption. That’s not to say the lists are wrong; quite the opposite. Nearly every list of technological advances will come true in the end, but they don’t represent the change, any more than a list of ingredients describes the meal.

Real disruption is the unexpected new thing that emerges when all these technologies are brought together to create a solution that was previously unachievable. Mobile devices have been “invented” many times, but the real explosion only happened when a whole list of technologies came of age and someone squeezed them all into a single handheld device, connected it to the internet and created an ecosystem around it. We just call the result the smartphone, because that’s the bit we own and hold in our hand.

You may have noticed that, despite all the noise and publicity around virtual and augmented reality, it didn’t appear on my list; there is a reason for that. I don’t consider VR/AR to be a technology as such or just a device, but instead a potential disruptive change similar to that of the smartphone ecosystem. VR is not the headset, and AR is not just a smartphone app. These are, in my opinion, just the PDAs of the 21st century, and they will go the same way as the PalmPilots, Psions and Apple Newtons of the 1990s. Remember them?

Over the course of my life there have been many attempts at introducing virtual reality to the market. To be accurate, VR significantly predates my life. I was born in 1966, 127 years after the invention of the first stereoscopic viewer (View-Master – 1839), 16 years after the first “immersive” virtual reality machine (Sensorama – 1950), and 5 years after the first motion tracking head mounted display (Headsight – 1961). This article on the History of Virtual Reality makes for interesting reading on the topic.

As a genuine fan of virtual and augmented reality, I’m willing to put up with a lot of discomfort to experience it, but even I would say that the most advanced offerings currently on the market are still not ready to disrupt our lives in the way the iPhone and its successors did. To succeed, the technology would need to become far less intrusive. I’d suggest three essential characteristic for a VR headset to achieve wide adoption:

1. Ultra lightweight (<100g)
2. True focal depth
3. Low price (<$200)

No one is anywhere near this at present.

What’s next?

I stated earlier that disruption often happens when you bring together several new technologies to create a solution that was previously not viable. So, what might happen if you bring these technologies together? Could they create a genuinely disruptive outcome? 

Imagine implantable devices made biologically compatible through advances in genomics and powered by sub-miniature, fast charge batteries. These could even be charged by the body’s own chemical processes. Now couple these with an information ecosystem enabled by AI recognition systems and you can bring an augmented world directly into the senses of the individual allowing them to be more intuitive and informed in everything they do.

This could be utopia or dystopia. In reality it will probably be a mix of the two, but for me, there is real promise in this. It could also be the ultimate alternative to reality into which we all disappear and stop interacting completely. The smartphone is accused of exactly this sin, but perhaps those who say this are forgetting the trains full of people reading books and newspapers, and the father at the breakfast table hidden behind his broadsheet. 

Maybe they’re not aware of the moral panic that arose around “these foolish, yet dangerous, books” during the rise of novel reading as a pastime in the 18th century? The article, “The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th- Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic”, has an interesting take on this. 

Perhaps, with the right ethical framework, human augmentation could become a disruption in which technology does all the emotionless, mechanical things so that people have more time to actually be human.

Who knows. Only time will tell.