Where will technology have taken us by 2037?

Sometimes, when I think about technology I feel like I have lived through more than one lifetime. Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

I am 35 years old and computers entered my life when I was 9 years old. I was given a ZX Spectrum by my parents for Christmas in 1983 nearly 27 years ago. I loved that computer and cut my gaming and programming teeth on it. I still look back on those days with a smile. I also now struggle to remember a time when computers were not an integral part of my life in one way or another as that computer followed by the subsequent ones (in parallel with a PC my parents got around 1987) ultimately led me to pursue a career in software development.

But the nature of the technology has changed beyond all recognition in those intervening 27 or so years.

My first computer had 48K of (random access) memory. It took 4 or 5 minutes to load a piece of software from a tape drive. You could only have one program in memory at any one time (well occasionally clever programmers got round this but with so little memory there was little point). I then moved through various other 8 bit machines and then through a 16 bit Atari ST in 1990 until eventually working with PCs during college and university.

Now I have a laptop for work and a pretty powerful PC at home both of which have many multiples of the processing power and storage space of that ZX Spectrum back in 1983.

When I was a kid I probably would have predicted that computers would get faster and would allow more storage space as well as give us much higher resolution displays. They were always the obvious limiting factors. Perhaps however the most surprising thing now though is that I carry around in my pocket a device in the form of a 16GB iPhone 3GS that:

• Is around 170 times faster and has almost 350,000 times the storage space than my ZX Spectrum did (indeed there are games available for the iPhone that would have been amazing as arcade games just 20 years ago) whilst being less than a tenth of the volume and a quarter of the weight.
• That I can use as a much better version of a Sony Walkman which can store hundreds of hours of audio.
• On which I can watch many hours of video either downloaded or even streamed from e.g. the iPlayer.
• That I can use to take photographs.
• That I can store digital photographs taken on this and other devices for viewing any time I want.
• That I can use to take live film including audio.
• That I can use as a dictaphone.
• That has GPS built in and a mapping application that will show me precisely where I am at any time just by tapping the screen a couple of times.
• That has a built in compass.
• That I can use to keep track of multiple electronic correspondence through e-mail, contact details for everyone I know and that I can use as a calendar/diary. All of these automatically sync up with accounts that are on my home and work PCs too.
• That is always connected to the internet and that can rapidly look up any of hundreds of millions of pages including almost all print publications instantaneously.
• That I can run applications on to do almost anything that you can think of including games, TV Guides, "What is near me" type apps, train timetable search apps, weather apps, etc. etc. etc. with thousands of new ones appearing every day.
• Oh, and of course I nearly forgot that it can be used as a telephone!

When you start to write down the list of what a modern device like an iPhone can do you start to realise just how far we have come. Frankly if I had taken the 9 year old me to one side and shown him an iPhone and what it was capable of it would have blown his mind. Yet these devices and other similar ones are commonplace in 2010. Millions of people in this country have them.

What it makes me wonder though is where the technology will be in another 27 years. In 1983, my father was the age that I am now. So when I am 62, (the age he is now) where will the technology have taken us?

I risk looking a bit foolish trying to predict and looking like those old Tomorrow's World episodes that predicted hovering cars and pill meals on the moon but I will have a stab:

• I think by then we will have devices that are augmented with the human body. Perhaps even linked into the brain. At the very least I expect them to link in with our vision system somehow to allow a fully immersive augmented reality experience to be readily available. AR is already here in some forms.
• Communication technology will have advanced so far that Gigabytes or even Terabytes worth of data will be transmitted over the air in seconds. This will mean that massively high resolution images and videos will be able to be sent to these devices remotely in effectively real time on demand. How this will affect the structure of our media provider companies is unclear but the landscape will surely be utterly different to what it is now.
• The technology to allow whole life recorders will be widely available within the next few years. That would put an end to arguments about who said what when but of course would have huge implications for civil liberties which might make their adoption problematic.
• I expect within 27 years for the problem of Artificial Intelligence to either have been cracked or for the power of the processors and storage available to allow a close enough approximation of AI to be widely available.
• I also expect voice recognition and synthesis to have evolved to the point where input devices such as keyboards are largely obsolete. I would still expect mice and touchscreens to be used though as there are some things that voice recognition will not be able to replace. However linked in with an earlier point, depending on how far the devices can be augmented with the human body they may be able to be controlled with the power of the mind alone. Scary but also very exciting.
• We will have hover cars, pill meals and will all be living on the moon. In spangly jump suits.

OK that last bullet-point was a joke. Of course they could all turn out to be jokes. That is what is so exciting about technological advancement. And I have just really focused on one small area of portable computer equipment. There are many other areas including biology and chemistry for example that I haven't even touched upon here.

Whatever happens between now and 2037 I am certain that were the 62 year old me to appear today and show me it would blow my mind even more than I would blow the mind of the 9 year old me back in 1983.

The early 21st Century is a great time to be alive.

Technology will force the Police to change

The news that Ian Tomlinson now most likely died of internal bleeding has once again thrown the spotlight on the Police and their tactics during the G20 protests. Indeed the Metropolitan Police Comissioner has now launched a review of police tactics which I welcome. I particularly welcome the public statement that officers should always wear their identification. It seemed a bit sinister to me that some officers involved in the G20 protests had either not worn them, or they were covered up or otherwise obscured.

I am a big supporter of the Police. I know they do a very difficult job often in very difficult circumstances. On the few occasions I have had dealings with them (as a victim of various crimes over the years) they have always been very courteous and professional and I have felt like they have done their best for me and that they were very much on my side.

However, I know that not everybody's experience of the Police is as positive as mine. There have been numerous examples recently of Police officers forcing people to delete photographs that they have taken in public areas. This story reported in The Guardian last week is typical of the sort of thing I mean where a tourist taking photos of modern architecture inclusing bus and tube stations was forced to delete his photographs. I saw on our local news in the South here a few months ago that a man who collected photographs of the insignias of different police forces took pictures of the one outside a police station locally and before he knew what was happening, several officers came out from the station, surrounded him and forced him to delete the pictures. Once it became a news story, a senior officer apologised and confirmed that what the man had been doing was not a crime, in spite of what the officers had implied. I apologise that I cannot currently find a link to this story.

A few months ago, someone on another blog pointed me towards a couple of youtube clips that had been filmed by members of the public.

The first one is somebody filming officers from his own garden questioning a cyclist. When one of the officers clocks that they are being filmed they come over to the cameraman on his own property and try to get him to stop filming. the cameraman stands up for himself and insists he is doing nothing wrong. The officers insist he is breaking the law but he refuses to stop filming and after calling back to base, the officers eventually seem to realise that they are in the wrong and walk away. He calls after them requesting to know their identities but they do not respond to him.

The second clip is more shocking to me. A filmmaker has put together a 6 minute piece which interperses him being harassed by two police officers (I think they may be special constables rather than full police officers) when he is filming in London with commentary on what is and isn't legal (filming in a lublic place is legal). The attitude of one of the officers is very aggressive. Straight away he starts shouting, putting his hand up over the lens and demanding to know why he is filming and also he wants to the filmmaker's ID and barks at him to "Give me your ID" as if we are in some sort of facist state. When the filmmaker stands his ground and insists he is not breaking the law he is told to "Shut up" by the aggressive officer before they finally walk off.

A cursory glance on youtube will find many more examples of this sort of thing. I highlight them here not to make a particular point about the incidents, there are bound to be overzealous police officers occasionally as you get in any other profession and doubtless they often have to deal with much less reasonable people than shown in these clips, and maybe they were just having a bad day - it can happen to all of us. I show them because it is an example of how it is much more difficult for people including the police to get away with this sort of behaviour given the state of technology. The first clip has been seen by nearly 300,000 people and the second by nearly 70,000.

It is now possible for ordinary people to carry round the means to take pictures and high quality filmed footage all the time. Indeed these features of often built into modern mobile phones which people almost always have with them. Given this, the Police can have their activities filmed at any time. They can be uploaded in minutes and viewed by thousands or in some cases millions of people within a few hours or days. The Police should not be afraid of this as if they are acting correctly then there is nothing to worry about. After all, the Police are big supporters of CCTV and use precisely that rationale to justify it.

The power of technology in the hands of the masses has been amply demonstrated in the aftermath of the G20 protests. The death of Ian Tomlinson that I blogged about last week and the alleged assault on Nicola Fisher are only now being fully pursued because in each case there is irrefutable evidence filmed by members of the public. This technology is only going to get smaller (hence easier to use covertly), better quality and cheaper as time goes on. Therefore it will be harder and harder for officials to conceal mistakes and wrongdoing.

In many ways I think this could be a very good thing as it will force everybody involved to ensure that their actions are above board. Public support for the Police has been slipping in recent years but if this decline can be arrested and turned around, and I think the inevitability of what I have written about here could be the catalyst for this, then it will be a win win for both public and Police.

UPDATE: And as I predicted, more video footage has come out today. There is no stopping this sort of thing now and every protest will bring more footage like this until the Police change their tactics.