Today, the government issued its 4 yearly intergenerational report, looking ahead to the year 2066 and what it might bring in terms of population, health, the economy etc – and of course technology.
In the report, the major technology focus is, you guessed it, AI, and it predicts there will a large reliance on it in the future in parallel with a growth of so-called data centres. I have only skimmed the report as it refers to technology, but I have a few thoughts on the overall concept, having been around in this computing lark since before the beginning of the “personal computer revolution”
In The Beginning
Back in 1971, July 21st to be exact, I started my first full-time job as a trainee at the National Australia Bank (now called NAB) in Derby in the northwest of Western Australia. Oh and by the way it is pronounced “Dur-by” not “Darby. Just so ya’ know).
My initial job was to categorize and balance all of the transactions through the branch for the day by way of deposits, cheques and of course cash itself as well as internal banking business like personal and home loans, term deposits and the like.
These were all performed on an analogue manual calculator that looked like a typewriter with only a keypad, and could accommodate the daily ledger sheet all these transactions were separated into, that was about twice the size of an A3 sheet.
We had a visit a few months after I started (I was 16 at this time) from the Regional Manager. He took the staff – all 5 of use – out to the local Spinifex Hotel for a feed that night, and over din-dins and a few bevvies, told us what the Bank thought the future would bring in a very short time frame.
“We’ll do our banking using small plastic cards with information encoded into them”, he suggested. In a world of cheques, paper currency (with the highest being a $20) and manual calculations and ledger machines, we all looked at each other and said “Yeah, right!”
Remember, this was 1971.
15 years later, we had Viatel and reasonable access to ATMs for our banking, but true online banking was still 10 years away.
But.
15 Years On
In that 15 years’ time span, we went from clunky analogue adding / ledger machines to the IBM PC on people’s desk as routine, running programs like VisiCalc, WordStar and dBase II.
In 1987, 16 years after my banking career had well and truly ended, I was on the Gold Coast (something I still regret to this day but that’s a whole other story) and running a software distribution company specialising in Windows 3.1 and Mac software.
Computers were quite normal in the home; add only another 7 years to 1994 and the internet was here and 1 year later, Windows 95 arguably made personal computing and the internet mainstream. This was the precursor to what we have today, with the only major changes now being evolving from diallup to ADSL to cable to broadband via the NBN and faster computers with more and more memory and storage.
My point is the changes from 1971 to 2026 have been massive and no-one I suggest could have predicted just how far we could come in 55 years.
Apart from computing, look at the differences in technology for cars, aircraft and other vehicles.
And of course, we didn’t even dream of mobile phones in 1971, and just over 20 years later, the analogue mobile phone was a standard [piece of kit for many. Who could have foretold TV streaming services, or even transmitting high-definition video live over 4 Km from a consumer camera when it was 1995?
Who would have even thought of 4K video?
My Point Is …
My point is any attempt to predict 40 years ahead I think is well prone to errors. Sure we need planning and I am all for that – I love the concept of psychohistory as invented by Isaac Asimov – and working out potential timelines is to be applauded. But by the same token, I have little time for so called “futurists” as all they can do is guess.
The future is a catalyst of a lot of things all working in synergy, and I am going out on a limb and saying no one person can predict it or even a small part of it.
(I can feel the “futurists” looking for the Hague voodoo doll and needles as I type this)
However, as I alluded to yesterday, one small thing can alter the entire course of history, or more correctly, where we THINK it might be going, and these simply cannot be factored into any futuristic thinking.
I give you Exhibit 1 – Trump for example, and perhaps, Exhibit 2 could be COVID. None of these were foreseen and both have thrown the entire world into a scenario no-one even thought about, even 10 years ago..
I know I refer to science fiction books and authors a lot, particularly Asimov and Arthur C, Clarke. I find it interesting that both these authors factored into their “epic” stories a manufactured “wobbly” to prove the point. Asimov had his “Mule” and in The City and The Stars, Clarke introduced Khedron the Jester, designed to introduce unpredictability and disruption into an otherwise static society.
I relate to these two characters as the unpredictability we have in real life.
Sadly, unless something REALLY unpredictable happens, I won’t be around to see 2066. I really wish I could be as I find the evolution of science and computing absolutely compelling.
But I would never dare to try and predict it. I’m not that stupid.