Thinking About the Future

THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

James R. Rosenfield

January, 2003

Today's future is awfully different from yesterday's.

Yesterday's future - the future of 1999, let's say - was filled with hope and vision. Today's future is clouded with the aftermath of September 11, the smoke from Bali, and, on a less deadly note, the dot-com crash. The heady future of the recent past has been replaced by the nervous future of 2003.

That says a lot about the future. We forget, don't we, that the future doesn't exist. It's always yesterday's future or today's future, and it changes based on how we change. The future, though, will do its own thing, in its own time, irrespective of our hopes, dreams, and fantasies. This is at once alarming and reassuring.

To bother with predictions is to run a fool's errand, but an irresistible one, nonetheless.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

In 1950, Popular Science published a drawing of a woman hosing down her sofa, with a caption reading "The housewife of 2000 can clean her living room with a garden hose, because everything is made of plastic."

Not only is no one cleaning her living room with a garden hose, housewives hardly existed by the year 2000. Not only was this prediction wrong in its technological specifics, it was (in retrospect) laughably clueless about social realities.

Also in 1950, Life magazine reviewed the first 50 years and prognosticated the latter 50 years of the century. Among other misses, Life ignored television, the most important social and cultural influence of the later 20th Century.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," commented Thomas Watson, IBM's Chairman, in 1943,

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home," opined Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977, just a few years before personal computers started taking over the world.

By 2002, if not before, we were supposed to have eliminated cars from cities; we were going to have a 20 hour work week; cars would be fueled by atomic energy; we were to wear paper throwaway clothing; there would be manned space flight to Jupiter; and of course we would work in paperless offices.

"Before the year 2000, paper will be eliminated from American offices," wrote Business Week magazine in November, 1975. Instead, paper use has doubled since then, from 100 pounds to 200 pounds per year in the average workplace.

There is always a joker in the deck when it comes to predictions, particularly those involving technology. Unintended consequences pop up like Jacks-in-the-Box, some of them utterly paradoxical. The same technology that was supposed to eliminate paper has instead created more of it. Technology designed to speed us on our way now slows us down, as we bog through traffic jams everywhere in the world. So it goes.

Marshall McLuhan, technology's great guru, pointed out that any technology, taken to a certain level of intensity, goes into reverse. Think about yourself, and your daily life in 2002/2003: You now get so much information that you can no longer pay attention to it, as information overload robs you of information itself. E-mail and mobile phones make "human" contact so easy that contact itself has become robbed of meaning. "Touch" becomes so intensified that human touch becomes devalued.

Predictions about technology don't come true because people persist in behaving in unpredictable ways. The action takes place where technology and people meet, the Interface. The action is unpredictable because the players are so complex. Adding to the unpredictability is the sheer novelty of new technologies, whose learning curve is yet to take place. "Media are put out before they are thought out," to invoke Marshall McLuhan again.

One more thing: Beware the illusion, especially on the part of business, that things happen faster than they really do. Peter Drucker has often commented that it takes a human generation for new technologies to develop fully, even now. Case in point: In 1972 the first e-mail exchange between two computers took place. But it was not until 1999 that any kind of e-mail critical mass was reached, with 130.6 million active Internet users.

Another case, this one sad indeed: Business' ravenous thirst for instant technological gratification has bankrupted the entire United States telecommunications industry, which busily spent the 1990s laying down enough fiber optic cable to broadband the solar system. Its time will come, but not now, not yet.

THREE THINGS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY PEOPLE IGNORE

1. New technologies begin with brittle interfaces, and mature only when the interface becomes transparent.

The automobile began with a crank. To start a car, you had to turn it, arduous, unpleasant physical labor. It wasn't until the advent of key ignition that cars became easy to use and integrated into the fabric of everyday life.

The telephone once required operator assistance, and lines were shared by other households. The phone in those days was used for special occasions or emergencies. Once phones became more convenient, they became an everyday medium for chatting and gossip.

MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, in his book "Being Digital" says that the secret to interface design is simple: Make it go away.

The Internet is plagued with a distinctly brittle interface, the keyboard, and, in fact, the whole personal computer platform and concept. Once the Internet is liberated from the personal computer, it will be truly universal. But the liberation may involve methods such as voice recognition, which are still imperfect and expensive, so it might still take a while, as Peter Drucker would suggest (see above).

As the Internet develops, be alert for changes in vocabulary. There's an inverse relationship between verbalizing a technology and comfort level. In other words, the more people mention a technology, the less a part of daily life it is. In the early days of the auto, people would say "Let's climb into the motor car and go visit Grandmother." When key ignition came about, people said "Let's visit Grandma." Hear the difference?

Internet vocabulary has already changed. In the early days, it was "Let's surf the 'net," which now sounds painfully archaic. People are already leaving the Internet out of the conversation, a strong sign of its integration into daily life, in spite of the clumsy interface.

2. New technologies don't make old technologies obsolete. They change their roles.

In the early years of television, radio and movies were thought to have a dire future. Far from dying, though, movies and radio became bigger than ever, although they now had to share the media stage.Rather than killing movies, television emerged as one of their major distribution channels. Radio faded away as an entertainment medium, but came up big as a news, sports, and, most significantly of all, talk-back medium.

Bankers throughout the world love on-line banking, and pray for the demise of the brick and mortar branch. In fact, bankers have been predicting the death of the branch for at least 30 years now. But in the U.S., there are now more bank branches than there were 15 years ago. They have changed their form, though, and many are now located in supermarkets, rather than as expensive, stand-alone edifices.

The convergence vs. divergence argument relates to the idea of technologies obsolescing each other, or at least new combinations coming to the fore. There's a school of thought that sees the Internet combining with television plus telephone in one household unit. This would be eminently feasible, convenient, and space saving. Television and the Internet, though, are very different media, one passive and the other active. I might be wrong, but I'm in the divergence camp. One reason is historical. Television started out convergent with radio. The first TVs, back 50 years ago, had radios built into them…or maybe it was the radios that had TVs built into them. At any rate, the two media soon enough split apart.

3. Technologies always have unintended consequences, frequently paradoxical.

We've already discussed this at some length, but it bears repeating.

Fire saves and destroys. Television informs but dumbs us down. The Internet is both a labyrinth and a compass. But hark…

I HAVE FIGURED OUT THE INTERNET!!

In the cold, clear light of 2003, it is very clear that the Internet is:

a) The most important communications technology in the history of the world.
b) An overhyped bubble.
c) That which changes everything.
d) That which changes nothing.
e) Of extreme philosophical and metaphysical importance.
f) Just another channel.
g) All of the above.
h) Some of the above.
i) None of the above.

No one knows, because media are put out before they are thought out. If you ask me, I think the Internet will be at least as significant as television, and that's pretty significant. But that's all in the future, and the future doesn't exist. However…

I HAVE FIGURED OUT THE FUTURE!!!

Yeah, and there's a bridge I'd like you to buy also. However, here are some things that I personally use as guidelines, for what they're worth, in thinking about the future:

--Be cautious of solutions for which there are no problems. No need to elaborate on this, especially if you lost a penny or two in the Internet bust.

--The Internet will dominate (is dominating!) the business-to-business sphere before the consumer sphere. For good reasons: Business is pretty much completely wired. Business is also transaction-intensive, and the Internet is terrific for transactions. For example, the Insurance Journal (Oct. 11, 2002) reports that "75% of transactions for Zurich Small Business Insurance are over the Internet."

--The Internet disintermediates, but also provides lots of opportunities for reintermediation. No middle person is terrific, until there are problems or questions. "High tech/high touch" should be a byword, not a cliché. Relationship and trust will become more and more important as technology prevails. People will pay for simplicity and convenience, and customer service will be the critical differentiator, more and more as time goes by.

--Most important of all, for both your sanity and your success, be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian proclamations. For every book telling us that within 25 years we'll live forever and there will be no more war, there's another one saying the world will end tomorrow. Neither one of these extremes will be correct, so ignore each and try to stay in the rational middle. There's a lot to be said for keeping one's feet on the ground, and moving forward, one step at a time.