Future Technologies
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010Last night a small delegation from Saint London attended a discussion at London’s Southbank on the weighty subject of Future Technologies. The speakers involved in the debate were:
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Stephen Fry, writer, broadcaster and technophile
- Professor Dame Wendy Hall, leading computer scientist at University of Southampton
- Bill Thompson, technology critic and commentator on digital culture
- Jim Haseloff, expert in Synthetic Biology at the University of Cambridge
The session was lively and challenging and covered a broad spread of subjects, from the worrying advent of a digital underclass to the longer term effects of the meshing of man and machine. There were two main things that stuck in my head personally from the night though that I’ll expand on.
Firstly, Stephen Fry talked effortlessly about the ridiculousness of even trying to predict what technology will appear, or more specifically the pointlessness of predicting how people will end up using the technology made available to them. Would the inventor of the piston ever have imagined that out of that technology the car would be produced, swathes of tarmac would cover the world in the form of motorways, that one way systems and congestion charges would be commonplace in cities, or that Top Gear would be so very popular on the tele. We guess not.
And I think that this is a very important point for all of us working ‘in digital’. Technology is set free by the people who play with it, to use Mr Fry’s terminology, all technology in the end becomes ‘human shaped’. Are we prepared to develop future technologies in such a way as not to dictate its usage (Apple), but to encourage its development by the people who use it (Google)? Are brands ready to understand that people will not always use what they make for them in the ways in which they intend? If they do then they’re half way there.
The second area that fascinated me last night was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s reference to the technology that he’d like to see in the future. He made reference to the potential of technology to make the world a smaller place, to break down borders, to help maintain Democracy, and even to improve Democracy and make it more…er….Democratic.
We’ve seen many examples of people taking to the web in protest, to join forces to engender a change in the real world, using the web as the starting point. But from an anthropological perspective, what does this smaller world mean for us long term, how likely is it to affect the way that we exist as people? Will it change us as human beings knowing that language is no longer a barrier (Google Translator), that location no longer makes face to face conversations prohibitive (Chat Routlette, iPhone 4) and that there is never any piece of information we can’t lay our hands on within seconds? Or will our innate humanness, evolved over thousands of years, remain intact and our behaviours rigidly in place?
I can’t help but come over all flower powery when I think about a future world with more and more access to information and fewer and fewer barriers to disseminating it. Future technological developments will I believe be judged on how well they facilitate deeper involvement between people, a greater communal understanding across the globe, and the moment that happens will truly be the moment that the machines have taken over the world, a moment when rather than us improving the technology, the technology improves us. And for brands this means transparency, an opportunity to be whiter than white, to come clean about production practises and work ethics. An opportunity for them to adapt to this new, connected, digitally empathetic society with positive products and relevant brand utility, and as a by product become better than ever.
Right now we have the opportunity to jump online and be paired with a random stranger anywhere in the world which to me is an epic, epic opportunity for humanity.
Yet people still want to get their meat and two veg out. Shame really.