The march of (technological) progress

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.