What does the future hold ?

 

There’s a lot of stuff to worry about in the future, according to trend-watcher and futurist Richard Watson.
 
The author of Future Files, a book that foretells “the five trends that will shape the next 50 years”, says we can look forward to a total loss of privacy, drowning in information, a ‘digital dark age’ and everything generally getting faster and more expensive. And yet he claims to be an optimist.
 
Faster and more expensive
On the topic of whether the future will actually be better or worse than the present, Watson only ventures that it will be “different” – and that it will be up to the individual to decide whether it’s better or not.
 
“I am personally looking forward to the future,” he says. “In fact, I’m planning to spend the rest of my life there. I wish I was a little bit younger so I could see more of the technology yet to be invented. I’m possibly a bit too old to see the really mad stuff – artificial intelligence in 20 or 25 years, I’ll be around for that. But I don’t think I’ll be around for when we’re downloading consciousness into a machine.” 
 
Artificial intelligence? Downloading consciousness? Just a couple of the innovations Watson foresees arriving in the next half-century, along with 3D faxes, robotic surgery, self-driving cars and doors with face recognition.
 
As for the five major trends that will drive change over the next 50 years, Watson is betting on ageing, global connectivity, the environment, technology (in the shape of genetics, robotics, internet and nanotechnology) and a power shift eastwards. But just how reliable are such predictions?
 
Predictive power
“Looking forward more than about 10 years, you’re almost setting yourself up for failure,” he admits, but he maintains that peering into the future is worthwhile – if tricky. 
 
“A lot of it is speculation and using your imagination. It’s projection up to a point – things like China becoming the world’s biggest economy well before 2050… These are projections and we can’t know for sure. My general point is that it’s worth having a discussion about this, even if at the end of the day you’re proven wrong. It’s better than not having the discussion at all.”
 
To predict the future, Watson is convinced that we must look to the past. “I am firmly of the opinion that history is hugely important and that we forget it at our peril,” he says.
 
“Look at the chaos in the financial markets. I remember having a chat a couple of years ago with someone who was absolutely convinced economic cycles had finished and that we were in for a 50-year economic boom. Just looking at history I found that so unlikely.”
 
Spotting patterns
So historical patterns have a lot of useful clues for futurists, says Watson: “Things like how people react to new technologies hasn’t changed in 100 years. People can be quite distrustful and cynical and reject things and then slowly they make their way into the mainstream. The things we are now worried about with regards to technology are the same things people were worried about when the printing press was invented.”
 
And then, besides knowing your history, forecasting the future means “just walking around with your eyes wide open”.
 
In some cases, looking into the future is as easy as looking to another country, Watson tells us, quoting science fiction writer William Gibson: “’The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’"
 
The future is here
“So if you took something like mobile telephones, I think that’s absolutely true. If you go to Seoul or Tokyo right now you will see what will be in Britain in five or 10 years.
 
“For example, reading serialized novels on mobile phones is really big there. It hasn’t taken off in the UK yet. There are people writing 80,000-word novels on mobile phone keypads in Japan. I think five of the top-10 selling physical books there started life as digital download novels.
 
“So that’s a good example of how if you look in certain areas you will see the future already – the future already exists, it just takes a while to move from the fringe into the mainstream.”
 
But however smart you are, says Watson, the future will always have surprises in store.
 
“There are always wild card events - things that are so unimaginable you can’t possibly predict them,” he says.
 
Wild card events
“You cannot predict individual events. That is the stuff of horoscopes and horse racing. What you can do is see broad patterns. You can see waves building up occasionally. You can make speculations. The further out you go and the broader you get, the easier it is.
 
“So if you say: what’s the future for wireless communications? Then I’d say it’s a reasonable guess that it’s higher speeds and more connectivity. I’d be surprised if I was proved wrong on that. But getting very specific about that is more difficult.”
 
As a “cynical optimist”, Watson is looking forward to a number of the predictions in Future Files coming to pass.
 
“The robot that does the ironing will be truly awesome,” he says. “And I think there’s quite a lot to be done with emotionally aware machines – self-driving cars that can work out what mood you’re in and adjust themselves accordingly – their speed, lighting, ambience. Maybe a television that can work out what mood I’m in and suggest appropriate programming."
 
Artificial intelligence
“I’m quite looking forward to artificial intelligence on some levels. And then robotics and robots have always been a feature of the future in science fiction – we’re on the cusp of that now. Bill Gates talks publically about robotics being the next big thing and I don’t think he’s wrong. Robotics is going to be huge.”
 
As mentioned, however, Future Files is far from a utopian vision of the future. The things to worry about are many and varied – from potential nanotechnology disasters to the problem of “constant partial attention”.
 
Watson is concerned that in the future we will never switch off – even now we have our mobile phones on all the time and our computers constantly on and connected to the internet.
 
Constant partial attention
“We’re constantly scanning the digital environment to see what’s on and what’s important. There’s never any time and a flood of information, so we scan stuff – we don’t read it properly, let it sink or reflect as much as we used to.
 
“There are also some scary statistics about how often couples speak to each other and their kids versus how much time they spend online – and that cannot be creating strong relationships, I’m convinced of that.” 
 
For better or worse, it seems the future will bring radical and surprising changes. To see just how much change the next decades will bring, Watson suggests bearing in mind the technology introduced over the last 20 or 30 years.
 
“Think what we have now that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago,” he says. “It blows the mind. When I started working, there were no computers in the office, no mobile phones, no internet, no Google, not even a fax machine. It’s extraordinary in a quarter of a century how much things have changed.
 
“Everyone’s saying where’s my flying car, my hoverboard, my invisibility cloak? It’s so disappointing - there’s no colonies on the moon yet. And you go: well, hang on a second."
 
Where's my hoverboard?
“First of all, commercial space travel has just about started. You’ll start getting that in the travel agent in a couple of years - if you happen to have a couple of hundred thousand pounds spare. Things like voice recognition, text recognition, the most amazing technologies are out there right now. Somehow they creeps under the radar – we almost don’t notice it. They show up unannounced and blend into our surroundings.
 
“So if you want to go forward another 25 or 50 years, I’d suggest that the same amount of change is likely to happen – and probably more, because technology accelerates over time.”
 
Though he declines to predict whether the future will be definitively worse or better than the present, Watson is hopeful. “We have got big problems to sort out but I think we will manage it. I’m extremely optimistic about the future. I think it’s going to be a hell of a ride.”
 
Copyright MSN UK

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