IT Prediction 2009

On Tuesday I participated in a panel session to discuss the future of IT and, in particular, what the hot topics will be for 2009. You know the deal: a bunch of "experts" sit in front of an audience and make grandiose statements about what technology will look like in 5 or 10 years, and you just know that in retrospect the predictions will either look obvious (if they came true) or naive (if they didn't).

This particular session was pretty interesting though because it maintained focus on the present and the near future, not some indeterminate point over the horizon that nobody can really see. It was about the issues facing businesses and consumers right now, and the issues they are likely to face in just a few months or a year.

Being part of these sorts of events can be a bit odd at times though. Because so much of my time these days is spent looking at the latest trends and investigating emerging technologies (or even creating them in the first place) I tend to live so far ahead of the bleeding edge that the knife blade is behind me somewhere trying to catch up, and I sometimes feel embarrassed raising issues that I feel are quite passe and so "last week" and then I'm surprised when other people think they're new and exciting. That's not to try to make myself sound good: it's just to highlight the huge variation across society in the uptake of technology. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet".

Some of the things people are doing with technology right now may seem like science fiction, but it's not fantasy: it's reality, just a reality that isn't widely distributed yet. For example, my letterbox has a network connection and an IP address so my home automation system can be notified when the postman drops by, and my car is connected wirelessly to the internet so my mechanic can use their web browser to interrogate my engine management system and run diagnostics in real time - while the car is hundreds of kilometers away driving down the road. And I have an RFID microchip implanted in my arm so I can unlock my front door just by waving my arm near it and don't have to carry keys. Right now I'm working on a device that will detect when I leave the loungeroom so it can pause the TV automatically, then if I walk into another room with a TV it will transfer the program across to it and continue playing from the paused position without me doing a thing. The TV show (or music, or movie, or video phone call, or weather data feed, or news headlines) can just follow me around the house.