Wired on Friday: Predicting the future seems to go hand in hand with the technology market writes Mike Butcher
When you're in a business where Moore's law effectively dictates that everything must get more powerful and cheaper every year, it forces you to think ahead to what impact this will have on a market.
And far from simply churning over updates on the same products and services year after year, the biggest IT companies long ago realised that they needed their own brand of soothsayers to peer into the possibilities and predict which direction they should take their businesses in.
Take Apple. A few years ago it was just another PC maker, with a tiny proportion of the market, because of its quirky take on the operating system. But it peered into the future and realised that music was going to switch from "bits" - atoms in the shape of a CD - to "bytes", digital information.
It came up with the iPod digital music player, which first benefited from the illegal music-sharing networks, and later from Apple's legal digital music store, which integrated seamlessly with the iPod. The rest is history. By turning the company in the direction of digital entertainment, Apple effectively re-branded itself as a consumer electronics company with some very cool technology. So it can clearly pay to throw a shilling towards the digital seers.
In the UK, perhaps one of the biggest employers of people engaged in the digital future is BT. This is quite some achievement when you realise that it hasn't been that long since the telecoms giant was just another dry, state-owned telephone company.
Whatever you might say about their customer service or their ability to rack-up profits by the second, this is one company that knows its futurology.
BT already employs 6,000 people in its research, technology and IT operations division BT Exact, with 3,000 of them stationed at a special research facility called Adastral Park in Ipswich. The park conjures up visions of a Soviet-style science city, but without the communist architecture.
Last month BT Exact put on an event billed as "an audience with the future" on London's South Bank. This brought together the director of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Johan Peter Paludan, the professor of information systems at the London School of Economics, Ian Angell, and BT Exact's in-house futurologist, Ian Pearson.
The audience was given free rein to ask questions about the future of society, in particular the influence of IT.
Angell in particular is well-known for his dystopian view of a future influenced by technology, often coming across as almost anti-science, anti-technology and, more often than not, anti-government. He famously argued in the mid-1990s that the introduction of cyberspace into business would engender mass unemployment for the unskilled and economies run only by the "elites" of society.
A self-confessed Thatcherite who calls himself a "prophet of doom", Angell told the assembled crowd to get used to a world where total surveillance via technology would be the norm, along with the creation of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.
Perhaps most interestingly, both Angell and Pearson agreed that the countries inside the European Union would be hamstrung in their ability to compete technologically with either the US or Asia. Their reasoning was that Europeans are fundamentally more averse to technological change and risk. In other words, Old Man Europe just wants a quiet life, unlike the "new world" and the "tiger" economies of Asia.
Both men even went so far as to say the EU would implode as a super-state in the face of global technological competition by 2028. Only Paludan suggested that the EU could be invigorated by its new Eastern European members and their hunger for new technology.
Pearson, the most technologically optimistic of the three men, held out the prospect of nanotechnology being able to deal with climate change and clear up the planet's mess. He also offered the view that "ambient intelligence" - computer chips inside literally everything from doorknobs to coffee machines - would be a major influence on society.
One of the more fun predictions the futurologists made was that teleportation might be possible. But put away your space suits, as it won't happen for over a century.
On the question of having intelligent chips planted in the skin, Pearson argued that this would be a useful thing to do, as long as the system wasn't abused by governments. A Cyborg - part machine, part human - is already a reality. A nightclub in Spain has started offering its members an implant of computer chip instead of a membership card. Inside this club the chip acts as an ID that can also be used to pay for food and drinks.
By thinking beyond mere trends, BT is trying to work out where its next markets are. And the same principle can be applied to the smallest businesses.
For instance, if people now use the internet to buy from large supermarkets, why can't they use it to order groceries from their local corner shop? If I could place an order with my local grocer so that he handed a bag of shopping to me on my way home, wouldn't I shop more with him? Now that's my kind of future.
Mike Butcher edits netimperat ive.com and blogs at mbites.com
