Eye to the future

It seems that once the election season ends, my thoughts turn to the future, and perhaps your do too. Depending on the results, you may expect things to get better, but historically, I'd argue, those who expect worse are more often correct, regardless of which party wins. But what if one were to look further down the road than just the next couple of years?

There are in fact a number of people who spend much of their lives attempting to foresee what we will experience in both the intermediate future, say ten or twenty years, and the longer term, say fifty or a hundred years. One might argue that what may happen a hundred years from now has no bearing on tomorrow, but I'm not sure I'd agree. I'll gladly admit that those in my age group will not see many of the long term changes, but we'll likely see at least the beginnings.

IBM is only one of many corporations that is constantly looking towards the future. Many in my age group feel fairly confident that the next decade or two are going to be fairly brutal. It will likely be at least a decade before unemployment ceases to be a major problem, and I personally don't see any possibility that American lifestyles, other than for the very rich, will not be dramatically scaled back. IBM doesn't mention anything about that.

IBM uses the slogan "The planet has grown a central nervous system", but after reading their visions it seems like it should be "We'll be watching everything you ever do." They also use the word "smarter" a lot, as in smarter cities, smarter healthcare, smarter banking and smarter energy. We will achieve these smarter scenarios, they say, by connecting as much as possible to the internet.

While there may be good reasons to want more connectivity, I'm not sure all of us actually want our bathroom scales connected. It seems that any item connected to the power grid can be connected to the internet, so you can rest assured I'll not buy an electronic toilet paper dispenser.

In England they now have cameras that not only record your car's speed as it drives by, they also instantly check that your insurance and taxes are paid up to date, whether or not seatbelts are being used and if you're guilty of tailgating. Of course if you have embraced the green version of the future, your electric vehicle might be used to track your travel history.

But the scary parts are not highlighted, ever. One quote from the IBM site reads "In New Mexico, Albuquerque (PDF, 142KB), is using a business intelligence solution to automate data sharing among its 7,000 employees in more than 20 departments, so every employee gets a single version of the truth" [my bolding]. Yes indeed, if there's one thing I want to see in the future, it's a government telling people which "version" of the truth is, you know, true.

Those who look further into the future see even more changes. There has long been chatter about what happens when our machines become smarter than we are, or become a part of us. A long ago television show, "The Six Million Dollar Man", is used as an example of improving the human body with technology. Is it any wonder we now anticipate improving our minds with the same? Where will that take us? Will it really be the beginning of the end? While the article is fascinating in a sci-fi sort of way, and well worth reading, I fervently hope I don't last long enough to find out.

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