Futurologists who forget the past are doomed to repeat it

Thursday night was the The Future of Connectivity, organised by the Club of Amsterdam at the RSA. It had:

Egbert-Jan Sol, CTO, TNO Science and Industry, mainly talking about the Internet of Things - Billions of people using 1000 Billion connected devices and bandwidth for free.

Peter Cochrane, Co-Founder, Cochrane Associates talking about Evolving Connectivity.

Hardy F. Schloer, Owner, Schloer Consulting Group talking about Human Connectivity at the Event Horizon of new AI Technologies.

It was moderated by the very moderate James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology, BBC Audio & Music Interactive. (Here's his blog post of the event)

Egbert-Jan Sol noted that we have moved from a world where 100 people worked on a mainframe computer around 1980 to one PC and one mobile per person around the year 2000, and we are approaching 100 computing devices working for one person by 2020.

His approach is what I'd call "rational futurology" - you can take the existing trends and project them out to make highly probable predictions. He spoke of 3 key laws:

- Moore's Law: The doubling of power for price very 2 or so years
- "Dollar a Day" bandwidth increase - consumer services are driven by "dollar a day" subscriptions but bandwidth doubles very 2 years or so.
- "Sol's Law" (Logarithmic decrease in volume of smart devices and increase in devices per person)

He also noted that the bottleneck in productivity in IT has moved from hardwars to software to comms to (today) services. He was mainly interested in the impact on traffic management, as the car moves from an automobile you control to an auto-mobile that controls itself - but the implications of computing power, size and price have many ramifications.

Next up was Peter Cochrane, whose main argument is that the world is now too complex for man to manage, and that mismanagement with 7 billion people and a massively interconnected global economy was far riskier than in say 1918, with 2 billion people and localised economies - looking at the mathematics of how pandemics spread, and the thin skein of services on which totally we rely today, he noted that the question for a 1918 style Spanish flu outbreak now is not "how many people can we save" but which people at the power companies, telcos etc do we have to keep alive to keep a far more serious set of problems from occurring.

Thus machines will have to come to our rescue if we hope to survive. His view was the management methods (and politics) as we know it is reaching the end of its useful like - as he noted, bankers and politicians:

"reached for simple solutions to complex problems - and they are all wrong, and lead to unwanted consequences"

He also noted that "Social" mediums were unlikely to work simply because the combined intelligence of people, even if you can get wisdom rather than madness, is not enough and the combined intelligence of machines will be required. The Social networks of people will be small beer compared to those of machines.

Internet of Things points he made were that its not so much the "smart dust" of sensors that will really impact us first, but all the sensors in our devices - PC's, Smartphones, cars - that will have the biggest impact first.

Last up was Hardy Schloer, who asked us to recall what Darwin had said about survival of the fittest - "fittest" was not the strongest or cleverest, but those that are the most adaptable. He also pointed out that in fact we have given over quite a lot of organisation of our lives to machines (eg complex trading, much of manufacturing) and that they are taking over our leisure time - After Big Blue beat Kasparov, the global interest and newspaper column inches given over to chess plummeted. He sees that this will happen in area after area.

We would be free to enjoy a life of leisure, wired up directly to devices that would fulfil all our fantasies.....

And yet, and yet...I recall all this being talked about 30 years ago when I were a spotty youth - in fact it was really brought home to me the next day at the Tuttle club where I met Maggie Philbin, who used to present Tomorrow's World - and launched the beginning of the Internet of Things when she demonstrated the first bar-code reader in 1983 (and who no doubt launched many a young man's interest in technology - see picture above, she is an the right ) and I'm pretty damn sure she used to talk about how all these machines would take over and we would live lives of leisure etc.

It didn't turn out that way, and it made me realise that Futurologists also have to look at the past to find out why predictions did not pan out as expected. As the philosopher Santayana pointed out, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.