The Next Twenty...

It is impossible to predict the next 20 years or even the next 20 months in

technology terms. Technology has its own way of confounding business acumen,

brilliant minds, forecasting tools and powerful computers. It creeps up unseen

and then unleashes the one application that changes things forever. Who would

have forecast the spreadsheet, the Internet, email, the fax machine, mobile

connectivity or any of the other applications twenty years before they happened?

In fact, many technological achievements happen much before the society at large

absorbs them and to that extent development is an economic and cultural issue–and

not one of technology development.

Without doubt the now-flavors are convergence and mobility. And in the more

distant horizon they are biotech and artificial intelligence. What will be the

killer apps that these will produce? Even as one ponders about that there is an

equally big challenge of fulfilling the present. Technology’s biggest

achievement is the pace at which it has surged forward. Its biggest failure is

the people that it has left behind. Even today — years after the first

automobiles, aircraft, computers were created there are millions who are far

removed from all these inventions. The big challenge therefore is not technology

development but technology deployment. And that needs useful, inexpensive,

easily available tools and applications.

So what are convergence and mobility likely to bring about? The mantra is

anytime, anywhere, anything. Freedom to access mail from anywhere, freedom to

entertain yourself anywhere, freedom to work from anywhere at anytime, freedom

to order goods in New York from New Delhi at 2 AM and many others. Yet –

somewhere there is a nagging thought that these freedoms only make one more tied

up. Conference calls between people getting ready to go to bed, those having

lunch and the ones with toothbrushes in their mouths – to decide

organizational strategies. Mail which pops up not anytime but all the time.

Messages and mobiles which seem to have a life of their own and ring at the most

inopportune moments. Family meetings over web cams. People, who watch TV, attend

to the phone, answer their email and surf a dozen websites all together.

Youngsters who chat in a dozen e-rooms at the same time. The list is endless.

And the fault is not that of technology. It is of its inappropriate deployment

and usage.

So to me the excitement for the next twenty time periods is not whether the

TV and the computer will become one. Nor is it of the great new mobiles which

will become smaller and lighter. After all how much smaller can they get? I will

have to become a midget to use the keypads if they get any smaller. And I do not

want to lose my lightweight phone in the deep pockets of my jacket so that every

time it rings I have gyrate to pull it out. The excitement is of new meaningful

applications deployed–hopefully –in more meaningful ways.

None of these are wishful meanderings. All of them are possible and

happening. Not enough but happening. And is a failing of the creators, users and

implementers of technology. Not a failing of technology. In many ways technology

has not failed humans. It is the humans that have failed technology.

The Next Twenty years will hopefully rectify this anomaly.

Shyam Malhotra



The author is Editor-in-Chief of Cyber Media, the publishers of Dataquest