Where Will Technology Be In 5-10 Years From Now?

[Rich Butterworth]

I was recently having a conversation with my 10 year old daughter, and she was telling me that she was bored. I proceeded to tell her to go outside and play, and she looked at me like I had horns!

She then went onto tell me that there was nothing to do outside....Now I am only 35 years old, and like to believe that I am still relatively young, but when I was a kid we all lived outside, I mean my parents literally had to drag us inside, and playing inside was a sin. Which brings me to the title of this thread.

Even though my daughter is fairly active in sports it seems that she and her friends all rely on technology to keep them occupied, and without it the world would simply end. She asked me for a cell phone, and I told her no and also told her we didn't have cell phones when I was a kid (again the horns look) and she didn't need one. I mean I try do appreciate a lot of the benefits of technology, and what it has allowed people to do with business and so on, but have we peaked as far as what we can expect from technology in the next 5-10 years....

If not what is next on the horizon?

Jamie Kochan

Slightly odd perhaps, but I'm also 35! Cue the Twilight zone-like music...

I have the exact same dialog with my own kids, and regularly find myself fighting pitch battles to wrench them away from one kind of screen or other.

I've eventually found a (reasonably) happy balance between 'strict rationing' - forcing them to create their own entertainment, and think outside the box - and reluctant acceptance of the fact that things have, indeed, changed since I was their age.

I know, "it's not like the old days" is a super-cliche, but it's surely something that every generation encounters.

I think a significant observation would have to be that their levels of 'expectation' when it comes to stimulation are way, way higher than my own when 10 years old. Most of the things I'd have been happy doing 'in my day' barely even register on their engagement scale - let alone actually provide any 'satisfying' levels of entertainment.

Anyone else experience this with their own kids?

God forbid they'd actually have to go kick a ball around outside... SO boring!!

The future? Mind-blowing.

Hooked Law has everything doubling in speed, and halving in cost, but it's even more than that. Technology is expanding in every dimension, exponentially and (to me, at least) it's getting to a point where even the most hardened 'maven' like myself has a hard time of keeping tabs on every front.

There's barely an area of cutting-edge tech these days that you couldn't spend your every waking hour mastering: Social media, web development, back-end systems, traffic generation - these are only sub-sets of the Internet Marketing industry we're all in here, but they each could happily soak up as much time as you could possibly bear to commit.

And don't even get me started on the freaky Asimov robot humanoid-type tech - I swear that by the time my son's my age the Chinese 'vision' of a practical home-help robot will be very much a reality in more affluent homes.

That's if they don't become 'self-aware' first, of course. :-)

And then there's the augmented reality onslaught. You've probably read of some of the recent marketing innovations using AR (one that sticks in my mind is a retailer whose catalog has a complimentary app that "removes the clothes of the models", in the catalog pages)...

Better not mention that one to my son.

I'm pretty sure we'll all be waving our smart-phones/tablets around our new cars in the not-to-distant future, to learn how to use their features, rather than read the manual. It's just around the corner for sure.

And what about the inroads into search-by-thought?

Another near-certainty it seems is that in the fullness of time we'll all be searching for information by thought alone. Some kind of device bridging human thought and Google search. I forget whether it was Sergey Brin's or Larry Page's fiancé whose company (specialising in such neurological advances) was the benefactor of a significant cash injection from Google some years back...

These are just a few areas that I could chew on for pages and pages, and there are dozens and dozens of similarly incredible innovations (nay, 'revolutions'!) going on, right now, under our very noses.

One thing that's for certain is it's going to be an incredible 5-10 years from now for us, and an unimaginably exciting lifetime for our kids.

Rich

(written on my iPad2 - another innovation we take for granted but that really is a game-changer - sat next to my son who, rather ironically, is watching a natural history program, albeit on a big screen).