 |
|
   
|
|
Technology Trends 2005 - 2014
14 November 2003
Three mega-trends will take hold as technology continues to change the face of society and business, predicted Gartner analyst Bob Hayward on day three of Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Sydney, Australia. Through to 2015, the over-arching trends for humanity will be the creation of the truly connected society, smart networked objects and semantic connectivity.
The increasing availability of wireless broadband networks will be one of the greatest agents of change, Mr. Hayward said.
The emergence of digital ink, radio frequency ID (RFID) tags to monitor the locations of goods will be two of many ways that networked smart objects will manifest themselves.
Mr. Hayward also spoke of experiments by the U.S. Government with so-called smart dust, which can be released from high altitude and then fall towards earth sending back signals of what it senses on the ground, such as military hardware.
At the opposite end of the scale, Mr. Hayward predicted smart pills will appear in the next decade. These will be engineered to release their drugs at pre-defined times, saving the patient from having to remember to take doses over a period of time.
Mr. Hayward cited Moore's Law of increasing computing power as a constant truth of technology. He said the power of an Xbox console is now the equivalent of a supercomputer in 1973.
However, not every technology will be an overnight success despite the speed of technical innovation. He said some technologies have a long fuse, such as speech recognition which has been vaunted since the 70s, but is only now maturing as a telephone interface for tasks such as ordering taxis.
The keyboard will remain the main interface to the computer at least until 2008—the planning period for the presentation—Mr. Hayward said.
Other innovations will occur in a comparative blink of an eye. The emergence in Europe and Asia of SMS (short message service) messaging has come out of nowhere, he said, as an example.
"It is a multi-million-dollar revenue stream that did not exist for telecommunications companies five years ago," he continued. Technologies that became successful quickly had threads of commonality, such as using current computing or technical standards, the ability to easily snap into existing infrastructure and are easy to use.
Researchers are paying a lot of attention to the generation of teenagers in countries such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore, who have been responsible for showing the rest of the world the possibilities of SMS.
Mr. Hayward said significant advances are being made in the areas of photonics, 3D silicon chip and MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) processors, which have moving parts too small for the human eye to see.
"Sensors will also play a big role in technology moving forward," Mr. Hayward told his audience. "You may even have seen an announcement from IBM about a new laptop that can sense when it is dropped and tries to do everything it can to save data before hitting the ground," he said.
More work needs to be done on improving battery efficiency, he said. The popular use of micro fuel cells will not emerge for another decade. However, other innovations, such as OLED (organic light-emitting diodes) and OLEP (organic light-emitting polymer) screens, will help conserve power for mobile and handheld computers.
OLED and OLEP are scientific simulations of how jellyfish emit light naturally.
"Some products using this technology will be with us by Christmas," Mr. Hayward said. "Japanese phone companies will shortly be releasing a mobile phone that uses OLED to conserve battery power."
Mr. Hayward was more cautious on the progress of artificial intelligence through to 2008. He said the area is over-hyped and he cannot see robots running around the house until maybe 2015.
Mr. Hayward finished his presentation, Emerging Technologies: The Radar Screen 2005-2014, predicting that five elements of technology, rather than technologies themselves, would have to be exploited to ensure innovation continues.
These are wireless, standards for technologies, better user interfaces, a trusted computing environment and miniaturization.
Mark Hollands
Gartner Staff
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
