Presence and Intelligence

I think the two major directions for technology over the next 5 to 10 years are "presence" and "intelligence".

For presence, I see two directions. One direction is building technology and networking so that I always have access to all my stuff (music, video, books, documents, games, internet, etc.) and it is continually available to me wherever I go. Everything is online and every tool I use to access it provides the same access whether I use a cell phone, netbook, desktop computer, etc.

The second presence direction is to make it easy for you to be virtually present anywhere. I remember reading a paper in 1989 describing a future situation where you could sit outside on a beautiful day and attend a virtual class through your tablet computer. The class would start at a specific time, you would connect through your tablet and see a video picture of your professor who would then teach. Any materials the professor used (interactive demos, etc.) would show up in separate windows while you watched the professor teach. Class discussion could occur and whoever was talking would have their video picture move to the front. Basically, you could attend classes without having to physically be there. (Except for class discussion, this begs the question of why we need the same professor giving the same lecture every year. Why not find the best professor lectures on each topic, get videos of them, and then put them on the net. Why pay all the professors to teach the same lessons each year. But this is a topic for another post about how to make education more efficient. Yeah, that idea scares me to.) I know that the Univerisity of Phoenix and others do this distance learning but the video, interactive technologies, and networks are still quite primitive but that is what will change over the next 5 to 10 years. When my wife and I had our first child in 1995, I kidded then that I didn't know if our child would go to college. I said the college might come to him. Of course hat would kind of take the fun out of attending college.

The second major direction is intelligence, making things "smarter" like cars, cell phones, computers, the electrical grid, etc. There are cars already that parallel park, brake if you get too close to another car, control braking pressure at each wheel to avoid slipping and skidding, etc. It will probably take 20 years before we have a car that can truly drive itself but until then we'll be adding intelligence along the way. Cell phones will get smarter about where you are and what you want and how it can help you. I'm already amazed by many of the iPhone applications. Who would have thought that you could hum a song to your iPhone and it tell you what the song is. There are some truly clever technology people out there with great imaginations. Who knows what will be added in the coming years.

I look forward to these exciting possibilities.