The hit song ‘So this is Christmas’ (War is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono opens with the following lines:

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

These lyrics, if a little sombre, speak of taking stock, reviewing the past and of the impact of time. With the Christmas season in full swing and not long to go before the big day there is probably many of us who feel we could do with some extra time in order to finish the Christmas shopping or carry out last minute preparations!  But if we lift our gaze a little beyond that of the festivities and celebrations which surround Christmas, we begin to look to the arrival of a new year.

Typically with any new year there comes the opportunity to review the past 12 months and celebrate the successes, whilst looking forward to the opportunities a new year brings.  There is the tendency to make resolutions and take active steps to improve aspects of our lives as we stand on the threshold of a new year with 12 new, unadulterated months available to us.  As 2009 comes to an end and we enter 2010 it is perhaps surprising to think that we will be approaching the end of the first decade of the new millennium.  It will be 10 years since talk abounded of millennium celebrations, the Y2K bug and the plethora of TV programs on Nostradamus, the end times et al. Given this significance it is perhaps a good time to think long term about the future particularly in terms of technological development.

Recently in the New York Daily Times, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote on what he predicts we will see in the coming decade in terms of technological development and change.  He starts the article by making his perennial point that changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. For example, the telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Who would have thought an idea designed to allow Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago would have such a global impact on our lives. The idea? Facebook - which now has 350 million users and counting.

Kurzweil proceeds to outline some of his key predictions for the next 10 years. Presently we regard a ‘smart phone’ to be a mobile phone with enhanced capabilities rather like that of a PC. Kurzweil predicts this will change so that instead of looking at a tiny screen, our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in air. This display will not just occupy a corner of our field of view but it will take over the entire field of view, putting us in a three-dimensional full immersion virtual reality environment. A lot of our personal and business meetings will take place in these 3D virtual worlds.  This does not seem too far fetched if one considers the use of Facebook, instant messaging such as MSN Messenger, voice over internet protocol (VoIP)  such as Skype. However as any of us who have used Skype for a conference call and end up wasting anywhere between 10 minutes to half a hour trying to iron out connection problems, microphone levels and audio output, it is all very well having the technology to do this but in many cases we will also require the technical infrastructure and support to develop in order to make it all happen and work correctly.  

Likewise, Kurzweil highlights the revolutionary impact of the iPhone and the advent of the app. Already there are going to be apps available for your iPhone that once you point it at a building you will have the display superimpose what stores are inside it; Google Goggles, released within the last month, is the first free, widely-available version of such software. By 2020 Kurzweil predicts that we have as a matter of course pop ups in our visual field of view that give us background about the people and places that we’re looking at. Clearly with developments of this kind questions about privacy and security arise particularly in terms of whether we really want to be bombarded by information about the person standing in front of us. But 10 years ago as we all celebrated a new millennium would we have imagined that in less than 10 years ago many of us would be giving serious consideration to and be willing to consider using 140 characters many times during the day in order to inform people of what we were thinking or doing? Such is the effect of Twitter on our lives.
With the debate over the obesity time bomb and the ageing population, Kurzweil responds with equal vigour as to how technology will even aid us in this aspect of our lives. By 2020, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and ageing, and toward significant advances in our ability to treat major diseases such as heart disease and cancer — an approach that Kurzweil predicts will be fully mature by 2030.

Lengthening and improving our lives and lifestyles will also be commonplace according to Kurzweil. By 2020, he predicts that drug development will have reached a point where trials will be underway on drugs which will off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. By 2030, Kurzweil believes we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy. However one cannot help but think this is missing the point. As with many of these miracle cures to overcome obesity the place and even value of self control must still play a crucial part of the process? If we all become complacent and simply turn to a drug or other form of medication to balance out our overeating surely we are storing up further problems for ourselves in terms of drug addiction. That is not to say that in certain cases where even the strongest will power and determination has not helped or even where other chronic medical conditions prohibit regular exercise this kind of drug could not be of benefit. Clearly it could be but how the promise and availability of these technologies is presented to the public is crucial.

Future transport

Rather surprising one thing Kurzweil appears to think will remain the same is that we will still be driving cars. Although, naturally, the cars will have increased intelligence in order to avoid many accidents and self-driving cars will at least be experimented with. What I find interesting is that only a passing sentence is given to the fact that all-electric cars will be popular. In the aftermath of the Copenhagen summit on climate change I find it intriguing that with all the talk about reducing CO2 emissions and cutting down on the use of fossil fuels that more is not being done in terms of future technological change to address this problem. So cars will have the intelligence to minimise accidents – great. But what about the issue of emissions? Will these intelligent cars be electric or we will favour intelligent cars over cleaner cars? Should we even be thinking of ways in which to reduce the number of cars – intelligent or not – on our roads?
What does not explicitly feature in Kurzweil’s article is any reference to convergence and converging technologies although clearly some points he makes refer to the consequences of convergence. However in my opinion the sheer impact of technological convergence is important enough to warrant being raised in its own right.

Convergence

The term ‘convergent technologies’ refers to the synergetic combination of four major ‘NBIC’ (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and technology, each of which are currently progressing at a rapid rate. Experts predict that more that greater developments will occur as convergence takes place as opposed to ongoing developments in each of the four fields separately. One only has to consider one of the most common gifts to be purchased this Christmas in the form of the Nintendo Wii (and all its various appendages in the form of Wii fit and wifi connectivity), the impact and use of Facebook and Twitter and Second Life, the virtual world accessed through the internet, to imagine what might emerge if these technologies converged. Surely a virtual reality environment is a reality in the next 10 years.

Engaging with the future

We may not all think we are futurologists or have the level of expertise and insight of Ray Kurzweil to offer our thoughts on the future. However, if questioned as to what kind of world, society or city we would want our children and grandchildren to grow up in then I’m sure many of us would eagerly and passionately offer our suggestions. Taking these suggestions and using them as a lens to consider, weigh and discuss the latest innovative advances in technology and science then we begin to engage with the future.

Strategists talk about future-projecting whereby you take time out to jump forward into the future using your imagination and take time to consider the kind of changes which you imagine will occur and how you will respond to them.

At this Christmas and new year season I want to issue a seasonal challenge to you to take some time out and do just that. Take time to think about the future and what it will hold. How will you respond to it?  How will you need to change if at all and why?

Here’s a quick guide to get you started:

1.    Identify an aspect of the future you would like to focus on and a time frame you would like to project to.
2.    Take three steps back, picking dates in history that allow a fairly even spread of time.  
3.    Using your imagination and what you know of history to formulate ideas, launch yourself into the future – dream and write down any ideas that come to your mind, using knowledge of human nature, technological developments and trends in society.
4.    Key Questions to ask yourself: How do you respond? What changes do you need to make?  What don’t you like? Can you avoid this?

Once you have done this it would be great if you felt able to share you thoughts and ideas below using the comment facility. We can learn so much from each other and be enriched from the perspective and reflections of other people on these important issues of technological innovation and change.

You can read Ray Kurzweil’s full article in the New York Daily Times online here.