The Challenge

Envisioning tomorrow.

Published by Esteban Glas on February 8th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: All this and that, long term thinking

I read this inspiring post at Markitude; and I couldn’t but let my imagination fly.

I wonder why we don’t get this same sense of vision Mark expresses Henry Ford had nowadays. Is it because we only perceive vision as such after it becomes a tangible reality or is it because we are lacking such vision? Is it because the massive amount of changes happening all around us blurs our perception, that things happen and change so fast that we can’t possibly try and predict what’s the future going to be like? Do we fear having visions in order not to look like class B 1950s SciFi movies look today?

PCs have shaped the world we live in today. We’d have no DVDs, no HD tv , no cell phones, and a lot of everyday appliances would be rather simple, for instance Microwave ovens would work on analogue timers, as they did in the 70’s. We’d still be using some form of tapes or vinyl discs (or whatever those would of evolved into if the CD had never appeared). Even science has taken huge advantage of computing power, even some “branches” have appeared thanks to chips being able to do a lot more maths that we would care to do (Chaos theory implications and arguments are based on millions of iterations, something that can’t be done manually).

Having a vision is fundamental to achieve great goals. Guy Kawasaki quotes Kennedy with his “we’ll put a man on the moon before the turn of the decade”. He went further and set both the goal and a time frame. Visions are never diffuse they are quite consistent and strict. “Computer business will change in the future” is not a vision, it’s just quoting the evident.

The other striking thing about visions is how absolutely simple and evident they look in retrospective; a man on the moon, a car for every one, a computer on every house; simple and strikingly obvious once they became true.

I feel visions have a lot to do with another thing I’m sort of obsessed about: long term thinking and slowing down. One can only envision something by profound thought and reflection. And those things take time. Even “illuminations” can only happen after aquiring deep knowledge on a particular subject.
I’ll take my chances and try my best in the “Futurology” subject; here’s a couple of things I envision for the future.

As PCs become cheaper and smaller we have integrated them into ever-shrinking gadgets. This trend is bound to continue. We’ll get processors into our toothbrushes in the future.

TV, Radio and web will be integrated in the not-so-distant-future. This will happen when someone comes up with an integration interface that requires as little effort as a common TV remote.

“Old School” Telephony is doomed. We’ll see it gone for good in the verge of the next 10 years in developed countries. It will take longer in third world countries, though.

Semi-conductor technology, which has taken us this far, will probably face a challenge when some other non-electrical (probably light) chip is invented. Silicon is starting to get to a point where it might not be physically possible to improve them the way we are used to. And the whole PC industry and derivatives rely on the ever increasing computing power extracted form used-to-be-sand.

Peak-Oil will become painfully evident. This will not evolve in the “doomsday – end of suburbia” way some people have foreseen, but rather it’ll affect our everyday lives and economies, forcing them to change in order to adapt to the “new reality”. And adapt we will. Once fossil oil becomes too expensive the switch to the next source of energy will happen faster than expected. What this source will be I don’t dare to say.

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