The march of (technological) progress

Technology sometimes moves more quickly than our ability to absorb the changes - even in such simple devices like remote controls and mobile phones

Our forebears 100 years ago could not have dreamt of the emergence of television, computers, satellites, lasers, iPods, or Google and Facebook. Nor of a global population (then approaching 2 billion) trending towards 10 billion people 150 years later in 2060. Or that a 21st century challenge would be an ageing population, not a prematurely dying one.

The defining technologies of the 21st century may not yet have taken form, but we can be certain that society’s challenges, our way of life, and our standard of living will be reshaped and improved by inventions and system leaps yet ahead.

Looking at the recent past, when Paul Keating handed government to John Howard in March 1996, none of amazon.com, eBay, Google or Yahoo! were yet a significant public enterprise.

All subsequently listed in the following three years and helped propel the dot.com era.

In 1996, one in five Australians owned a mobile phone. The phones were mainly analogue and in the hands of commercial and tradespeople. The mobile phone had just arrived as an important productivity tool. Today, there are more phones than people and all are digital with features far beyond simple voice calls. And they resemble mobile video handsets more than telephones. No business - or teenager - can operate without one.

Although the personal computer had appeared in the early 1980s, by 1996 only one in three Australian homes owned a computer and fewer than one in 20 had internet access. Today, more than three-quarters of homes and all businesses have a PC, and almost all of them also have some form of internet access.

In 1996 domestic internet access speeds were just 14.4 kilobits a second. Content was text-only - no video, let alone YouTube. Outside of engineering and technology firms and universities, email was just appearing in the more progressive businesses. Today, almost all enterprises have internet access, with the government recently announcing an ambitious plan to build a national high speed, 100Mbs broadband network.

In 1996, wireless text messaging was not available in Australia - at all. Today more than a billion SMS messages are sent each month, a volume to be further increased by the number of tweets being broadcast by the Twitter message service. Subscription television had just been launched on the back of a controversial dual cable rollout, but plasma and LCD screens were yet to appear.

The past two decades have seen an evolution from analogue products (think vinyl records, black telephones tethered to wall sockets, photographic film, 26-inch boxy televisions) to an all-digital ecosystem largely shaped by advances in the broad categories of IT, communications and the internet. The last industry to convert to a digital base is free-to-air network television, which will belatedly join the 21st century by 2013 according to the government’s timetable.

Spending on information technology has lifted to about half of many firm’s capital budget with large investments still ahead to address remaining legacy issues and new opportunities.

Ubiquitous communications have given meaning to the concept of 24/7. Technology sometimes moves more quickly than our ability to absorb the changes - even in such simple devices like remote controls and mobile phones.

Where are we heading?

The CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, recently offered his perspective about a world becoming smarter as intelligence is incorporated into more environments, which are increasingly linked.

He pointed to the following:

• two billion people (out of a global population of seven billion) will be on the web in 2011. At the same time, we are heading toward one trillion connected objects - cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines;
• one in two people globally now own a mobile handset - 3.4 billion;
• an estimated two billion Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags were sold in 2007, embedded in products, passports, buildings, toll-road sensors - even animals. This number should rise to 30 billion by next year; and
• massively powerful computers can be affordably applied to processing, modelling, forecasting and analysing just about any workload or task. And to monitoring the interactions between these trillion connected objects.

For the first time in history, almost anything can become digitally aware and interconnected - and it will be. He goes on to list modern society’s key processes and how they will be transformed and made safer and more efficient. For example:

• energy - where homes and individual appliances will be continuously monitored, and an intelligent electricity grid balanced to reduce energy costs to users;
• financial systems - even the most sophisticated systems designed and deployed just a decade ago were built for a different world. He says that given the complexity, speed, and scale of today’s financial markets, those systems are as antiquated as the horse and buggy. For instance, in the global currency market, US$10 trillion can be traded on a single day. This is a far bigger and more complex market than our currently damaged debt markets;
• food distribution - addressing supply-chain inefficiencies, reduction in “food miles” (the distance travelled by food from farm to your kitchen) and ensuring the integrity of the food and minimisation of food-borne infections;
• healthcare - online access to a patient’s health history and records would cut administrative costs, reduce medical error rates and improve patient outcomes; and
• traffic systems - congested roadways, imperfect sequencing of lights and searching for parking spots probably cost us billions of dollars annually in lost hours, petrol costs and polluting exhaust emissions.

He goes on to cover air travel (1,400 new international airports by 2050), weather forecasting, oil field management and water systems. His point is that information technology from, say, 1996 couldn’t even have begun to seize the opportunities and attack these problems. Neither could you have done it four years ago - IT was too expensive, too hardwired and too underutilised, with too many distributed parts in an unconnected world.

Now there is the potential in 2030, when computers are expected to rival the capacity of the human brain, to suggest unimaginable opportunities ahead. One well-known global company’s mission statement “To digitise all the world’s information” no longer sounds like corporate hubris.

Still, to help you recover your composure about such upcoming technology intrusions into our ordered lives, let me note that many interesting innovations of recent years mostly arise from technologies and systems that have evolved in a leisurely fashion, sometimes over decades.

The concept of machine-readable barcodes was patented in 1952, but the Universal Product Code that helped revolutionise supply-chain management became ubiquitous only in the past decade.

The fax machine - a basic business tool from the 1980s - facilitated development of home-based businesses when affordable models led to accelerated use in the mid-1990s and drove the installation of a second phone line in many Australian homes. Of course, it is heading for extinction.

Since some productivity-enhancing innovations often emerge in prior periods, it should be possible to predict some of the technology forces that might shape this generation’s experiences. For example, smaller more powerful batteries will increase portability and underpin wireless interactivity of … everything.

The Global Positioning System, available for civilian use since 1983, together with continuing microminiaturisation of componentry (such as cameras), will enable location-based products and services and appliances to proliferate. Low, earth-orbiting satellites will provide detailed views of all surface-based features - as Google Earth hints at today.

Continually increasing affordable computer processing power, bandwidth and data storage, friendlier user interfaces, coupled with proliferating devices (Blackberries, iPods, motor vehicles) will most assuredly push personal and corporate productivity to record levels, while raising a number of public policy issues such as privacy.

But predictions can also misjudge the uptake of seemingly appealing products and processes.

In the recent past the promise of video telephony/conferencing, voice activation technology, smart cards, HDTV, telecommuting, virtual reality and artificial intelligence have fallen short to various degrees, although it may well be just a timing issue.

Systemic changes ahead

During the 1970s France showed how a national strategy obsessively followed could build a better future for its citizens. Traumatised by the impact of the first oil shock in 1973-74, which saw interruptions to their key energy fuel - Middle Eastern oil - and massive price hikes, a coalition of industry, trade unions (communist) and the government agreed to introduce nuclear power to achieve national energy security and independence.

In the next 15 years, 57 nuclear reactors were built (now 59), which now generate about 80 per cent of France’s electricity while supporting “non-nuclear” nations such as Denmark and Italy with exported nuclear power. France is a country three times ours in population and GDP but with a smaller greenhouse gas footprint!

Australia does not yet see its industrial processes under similar threat, although the GFC may yet come close to having such an impact. But with considerable vision and conviction, the government is putting in place key technology policies with principles around which our industry and society will organise.

First, the commitment to clean energy, while still hotly debated in some quarters, will inevitably see dramatic increases in efforts directed at new energy platforms and solutions that prevent GHG emissions from fossil fuels reaching the atmosphere.

ATSE has published a number of authoritative technical reviews in this area which I have no doubt will grow in consequence. There appear to be few truly objective commentators on the subject of global warming and climate change. Of course, ATSE’s members cover the spectrum of public opinion on this subject, but the Academy’s technical judgments are supported by the wide and deep expertise of its members leading to scholarly, well researched and authoritative studies to date.

The second strategic initiative is the commitment to building a high-speed national broadband network. Few government or individual industry strategies will have as wide-ranging and important an effect on our economy as the availability of affordable internet access with world-class bandwidth by all Australians.

This policy is an example of informed government leadership and will lead to an environment within which many exciting and unforeseen applications and businesses will emerge even as the details of NBN execution potentially lead down unexpected paths.

On the topic of technology, there are certain laws that can be relied upon to produce breakthroughs as well as continuous change - like experience curves and Moore’s Law. These often underpin our confidence in claiming that no matter the (technical) problem, a solution will most certainly be found. The only points of dispute might be in the time estimated or the emergence of social issues such as ethical considerations and privacy.

But when a nation agrees on its priorities, especially when reinforced by a real and visible urgency, strong government leadership makes an emphatic difference and accelerated progress follows.

Technology-friendly culture

Many factors influence a nation’s productivity, competitiveness and wellbeing: education, work practices, quality of infrastructure, regulatory framework and so on. The role of technology and innovation is especially important, although the near-term connections are sometimes hard to quantify.

The modern economy runs on brainpower and skills. Initially, the new digital economy was owned by the young. Beginning in 1996, most high-school graduates were internet trained.

By 2016, 20 years later, half the Australian workforce will be of the internet generation, where web usage, and search and networking dexterity will be core skills - albeit in the hands of young people where only 35 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds will have a bachelor-level qualification.

And mobile computing devices will be the ubiquitous tool of trade.

Technically competent people will be needed - to help allocate increasingly scarce capital to the best investment alternative, to manage large and small engineering projects, to inform and drive public debate and policy and to make reasoned judgments about new technologies, which are not always free from controversy and concern and sometimes push us out of our comfort zones.

Realising the potential within our technically enabled society will not happen automatically. There is an important technology leadership role - for our universities, CSIRO, our national and industrial R&D laboratories, our great Academies, our governments - which could also deliver community understanding and support.

And it seems to me that ATSE, through forums such as this evening, is leading the way in illuminating the central role of science and technology in modern society and in celebrating our technology heroes.