I've seen the future

Our weekly tech bulletin this week included this entry from an IBM think-tank style gathering. A handful of industry luminaries thinking Deep Thoughts about how life will look in 2050.

As some of the commenters on that entry have already observed, this is all a pile of tosh. It's not even yet 50 years since the last instalments of Tomorrow's World were predicting various social trends only twenty years out, and getting it wildly wrong. Mind you, they were never very good at it. Many of their articles were so far behind the curve we used to call the programme Yesterday's World.

But my point is, predicting this kind of thing is impossible, simply because the things we'll be using then haven't been invented yet. It's all very well extrapolating from technology trends, but all that tells you is what you'll be able to do with stuff we already know about. Yes, processor speeds will be incredible and storage capacities unthinkably vast. Someone once calculated that you could store your entire life's memories in high-definition video, with audio and notes, in about 26 terabytes. For those of you not familiar with the term, a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Single terabyte discs for home computers are already available. By 2050 it's virtually certain that kind of capacity - 26TB I mean - will be available in a hand-held camcorder.

But being ABLE to do something with something is not the same as actually DOING it. Or wanting to. And predicting the future from a point before a life-changing invention just ends up being totally wrong. Look at the transistor, and the (now "humble") PC. And then go and watch a movie like Soylent Green, which is supposedly set in the future and which has its hero searching for information in piles of... what did they used to call it?... paper, all stacked up in a... you know... library. No Internet or desktop computers in sight.

This - this very blog you're reading and others like it - that keeps us in touch with people we have never/will never meet - is a phenomenon on the up. Web 2.0. Content created by real people for real people. Something that was not conceived of much more than 5 years ago. And something that may be almost dead 5 years from now. Bloggers may by then have realised that the effort of recording their insignificant lives is not worth the investment, or maybe the next sliced bread will have arrived fresh and hot from the bakery to take their interest, attention, and spare time.

Nanotechnology; biocomputing; genome manipulation; graphite sheets: these are all exciting new areas of research and many of them could be extrapolated with some degree of certainty. But it still won't give you the right answer. This time next year we could be hearing about something totally new - and there's still 40+ years to go until 2050. Think back 40 years - 1968 - and remember how you were spending your time and what the "hot new topic" was. The world would only need half a dozen computers (said the IBM think tank!!), the PC was yet to be invented, networking was in its infancy. Extrapolation was dangerous even then - we were about to land on the moon and the talk was of Mars being the next stop. Who predicted investment in space technology and exploration would be ratcheted back and we would be stuck on Earth for the next 40 years?

Those predictions by that small group of very clever people may look learned and erudite now, but when viewed from the perspective of the real 2050 they will look every bit as naff and silly as those offered by the people from Tomorrow's World.