BY DALE DUDA
This material originally appeared in The Inside Line, Volume 9, Number 4, April, 1996; pp. 1,13-15. © 1996 ARK Media Inc, 3030 Harbor Lane N, Suite 131, Plymouth, MN 55447. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
For nearly three decades, the focus has been on the turn of the century, the start of the second millennium when life is somehow supposed to be significantly different. But the new millennium is just four years away, and we already have a good idea of what life will be like in 2000.
But what about three decades from today, when we reach the year 2026? What will life be like then? What electronic devices will you be using to do your job, to get to your job, to live your life? What direction will technological advances have taken us? Will we even recognize our technology-filled world?
The Inside Line has consulted with a few industry visionaries for a brief glimpse into the future. Mind you, we make no claims that our visionaries possess extraordinary psychic powers, and we'd be lying if we told you they regularly consult crystal balls. However, our foretellers are exceptionally well-qualified people doing an exceptionally good job in their various fields of expertise.
For this article, we asked them to dream a little bit about what the future holds for the electronics industry and for society in general. Please join us as we journey in the time machine to the year circa 2025.
Randy Schulze, engineer and project director at Phoenix-based Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall, imagines that he will ride to work in an automatic car on an automatic highway. The architectural, engineering and planning consultants already have worked on a prototype highway design that would move personal transport units along a prelaid track on divided highways -- one lane for automatic cars and the other for "traditional" cars, whatever that may mean 30 years from now.
The consultants collaborated in 1993 and 1994 with Delco Corp., which is developing the technology for the future automobiles. The transport units themselves will be highly sophisticated, technology-laden machines that are either gasoline- or electric-powered, with satellite guiding and automatic navigational systems, solid state gyroscopes to keep them on track, and smart computers that "learn" the driver's driving habits. The cars will have all the comforts of home: ample lighting for reading or playing bridge, a personal computer port or deck to get your daily dose of Internet surfing, and a recliner for relaxing after a hard day at the office.
The benefits of such a system include less noise, less pollution, fewer accidents and faster trips to work. Rush hour will be a thing of the past as the transport units regulate their own speed and distance from other units in relation to traffic flow.
The project is prototyped on the current highway system, Schulze said, because that's the only feasible option when cost factors are taken into account.
"Money is always the problem," he said, momentarily stepping back into the realities of the late 20th century. "If you don't have the highways built, who is going to buy the automatic cars? If you don't have the automatic cars, why would the government build (and taxpayers invest in) the automatic highways?" (The chicken and the egg dilemma still plagues us in 2025!)
But, said Schulze, for the most part the technology already is here. No one seems to be coming up with palatable alternatives to mass transportation as we know it, so "intelligent" transport units may actually see the light of the 21st century.
"What was neat about the project was just using your imagination, trying to envision the world 25 years from now," said Schulze. "We did a lot of brainstorming and talked about all kinds of side issues and ramifications, like safety, parking, optimal speeds, and who would be responsible for accidents."
Smaller, portable, efficient, intelligent, and multi-functional are a few adjectives that describe the descendants of what we today call personal computers, pagers, cell phones, modems, electronic calendars, calculators, and so on, according to Tom Goodman of TechSearch International, an electronic technology licensing and consulting firm in Austin, Texas.
But "cool" is the adjective that best describes the power people will hold in their hands, he said. "You'll be able to link to anywhere in the world and it will be a seamless interchange. It's mind boggling."
Goodman predicts less packaging and more power for these personal digital assistants. "The best package for a chip is no package at all," he said. Or how about circuitry of a different color -- make that a different substance; biocircuits made of proteins for "living" computer cells that would "morph" or regenerate themselves.
"Interconnect" is the buzzword for the future of electronics, said Dieter Bergman, a researcher with the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC), in Northbrook, Ill. In order for computers to become smarter, smaller, more functional and less expensive, advanced interconnect technology will be necessary, even if it takes the form of light rather than electronics.
Both semiconductor and interconnect technologies are moving in the multi-functional, seamless direction, he said. And the technologies are probably here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. "Thirty years ago people were predicting the demise of circuit boards," he said, by way of example.
No matter which technology fits the bill, consumer demand will continue to fuel advancements. "There is strong motivation to provide consumers with more electronics and to keep the cost of the fanciest of these items to that of a television set," he explained.
Your personal product emulator will recognize your voice and handwriting, take your blood pressure, provide you with all forms of electronic entertainment, let you communicate the world over -- and when you're through, it will help you relax, said Bergman.
On a topical note, Bergman predicts the demise of the Iowa caucus as the presidential bellwether. Newer methods of communicating will change the way our representatives are elected and how they do their jobs. "I don't have a clue on what form that change will take, but the people in this country want a better say in what goes on," he noted.
Bergman also predicts the demise of prisons and jails with iron bars and concrete walls. Instead, "deviants" will be collared with electronic tracking devices that will "zap" them when they, shall we say, exercise bad judgment.
The lessons we learn from our inchoate experiences with the Internet will help shape the information superhighway of the future, believes Mike Usrey, founder of Protocol Communications, a Minneapolis-based supplier of Internet services for businesses.
Improvements in communications technology will have a myriad of consequences, both positive and negative, said Usrey. "There will be a lot of displacement in industry -- jobs will be destroyed and new ones created as information/knowledge companies locate along the data highways the same way manufacturing plants have sprung up near asphalt highways." That bodes will for the Midwest, with its information superhighway oases at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and the University of Minnesota.
Usrey also predicts a homogenization of world cultures as computer technology allows people to speak to each other seamlessly and in real time. The Internet will accelerate that process. Watch China as a key indicator of this trend. They are trying to walk a tight rope between the risks of falling behind in their information infrastructure and the risk of opening their society to western culture if they do upgrade.
Untold technological advances will contribute to group productivity in the next century, in much the same way that personal computers and their networking capabilities have made individuals more productive in the 1980s and 1990s. "Group productivity gains will be more challenging for companies of the future, but potentially more rewarding," said Usrey. The focus will be on collaboration, both within companies and among several companies, he predicts.
The drive to be more collectively productive will push the evolution of electronic standards so that it won't matter what type of hardware you have. Computers will be designed to interface with all other computers. Of course, we likely won't recognize the computer of 2020, but we're certain to be dependent upon it. We may even like it.
Usrey said electronic data interchange (EDI), now being used by some companies in limited ways, will become standard operating procedure as we finally become a "paperless" society. And the functions will broaden to include forecasting, specification modifications, and the like. Furthermore, workers of the future will not only "videoconference" (in a far more advanced way than we do now), but they'll also be able to work on the same project simultaneously from several locations, electronically passing a stick of chalk to make changes.
While we know that all these technological advancements will improve productivity and efficiency, the question is, will they contribute to happier, less stressed workers? "That's the $64,000 question," said Usrey. With inflation factored to the year 2020, it will be more like a $640,000 question.
This writer, with no expertise in making predictions, just wanton wishful thinking, hopes that by the year 2025, she'll be able to tell her tall, dark and handsome computer/robot (who will greet her at the door after a short day at work) to walk the dog, do the laundry, put dinner on the table, and politely hang up on telemarketers who call trying to sell subscriptions to cyberspace magazines.