REVOLUTIONS are times of confusion. The spread of new ideas can turn the
lives of millions upside down. Heads may roll. The only certain thing is that
the outcome is never clear from the start.
When Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive in 1801 he knew it
would revolutionise mining. He was, after all, a mine engineer. But little could
he have guessed that within fifty years steam power would be hauling people
round Britain, that it would shape Victorian cities and drive their growth, and
make seaside holidays a national institution.
Likewise, Vint Cerf and the Internet pioneers of the 1970s hadn’t a clue that
what people would really love about the Net was e-mail. It’s often the
unforeseen outcomes of revolutions that make the biggest impact.
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Today, we are on the threshold of a communications revolution fomented by a
raft of new devices that will exploit wireless technology or blisteringly high
data rates—or both. Between them they have the potential to create endless
possible futures: worlds in which people spend their whole lives online, where
distance becomes irrelevant and paper money loses its worth. Which of these
possibilities will flourish and which will fail? It’s too early to say. One
thing’s for sure: there’ll be surprises.
So just what kinds of technologies are we talking about? This special issue
will give you a detailed rundown on them all, but here’s a shortened tour.
At the heart of the coming change is the mobile phone—though the term
“mobile phone” is about to be found wanting. Very soon, talking to somebody will
be the least exciting thing to do with a mobile, says Pekka Sivonen, founder of
software developer Digia, based in Helsinki. Mobile phones are about to become
portable Internet terminals. You’ll use your mobile to film and view video, surf
the Web and sell your house. “The only thing limiting us is our imagination,”
says Sivonen.
Incidentally, don’t be surprised that Finnish people have lots to say in this
area. The country is home to the fabulously successful cellphone maker Nokia and
has become a hotbed of revolutionary ideas.
The biggest change coming over the horizon is third-generation (3G)
technology, which will regard spoken words as so much Internet traffic.
Conversations will be chopped up into digital packets and sent to their
destinations by whatever routes are free. Packet switching, as it’s called, will
do away with dialling up and logging on. The Net will be “always-on” and access
will be instantaneous
(see “Your everything”). And 3G technology will be
much faster than today’s phone systems.
Open sesame
In the future dreamed of by Nokia and Motorola executives, we will all carry
a mobile phone with us. More than that, we’ll be lost without it. Already, the
SIM card inside every digital cellphone tells the cellular network who your are.
So why stop with the network? The Finnish government is already experimenting
with the idea of turning these chips into electronic ID cards and passports.
Banks could use them too—to replace credit cards
(see “Your phone is you”).
Two other modifications stand to transform mobile phones. The first is
technology that will pinpoint a phone’s location. It’s being introduced to help
emergency services find people who make calls from cellphones. But once it’s in
place, an amazing range of services will open up
(see “You are here”).
Then there’s the addition of Bluetooth, a short-range radio transceiver. The
chip effectively creates a house-sized bubble around itself, and can communicate
with any other Bluetooth chip that comes within that bubble. So be ready for a
“10 per cent off” coupon to appear on your mobile’s screen as you approach the
local restaurant. Companies will be eager to push their wares at you.
Homes, too, will become a haven for Bluetooth devices. Lights, heating, even
the cat flap will become controllable from anywhere in the house. Add an
Internet link to your home and that control can be extended to the other side of the globe
(see “Brave new fridge”).
These kinds of technologies will start to shape our lives over the next five
years. The question is which will tickle the people’s fancy and which will
bomb?
We can already predict that some of them are going to have consequences that
now seem bizarre. Take Bluetooth. As soon as your washing machine is installed,
it will be on the air to your Bluetooth controller, asking if it can contact its
manufacturer over the Net. A year later you’ll trip over a repair engineer who’s
been e-mailed by the washing machine because it has a worn bearing.
Soon, the number of phone calls between people will be overtaken by machines
talking to machines on behalf of people, says Paul Saffo of Silicon Valley’s
Institute for the Future. The problem in the coming years won’t be your family
hogging the line, he says. “It will be your fridge having a conversation with
the washing machine.”
Then there’s location technology. Companies such as Cell-Loc in Calgary,
Canada, and Cambridge Positioning Systems in Britain are already designing tiny
cellphone transmitters to fit in children’s clothing so worried parents can find
them at all times. Ranchers could keep tabs on their cattle the same way.
Permanently hooked
These ideas may seem outlandish to us, but they’re not going to turn our
world upside down. That requires something extra. Saffo and Ian Pearson, a
futurologist employed by British Telecom at its research centre in Suffolk, see
that type of shift coming from another direction.
Once we’re all hooked up to the always-on Internet, we will change the way we
behave towards it, says Pearson. We’ll come to rely on it just as we do on
electricity. “You don’t think about electricity,”he says. “It’s just there.”
Our reliance on the Net will become equally unthinking. No more booting up,
waiting for the modem to log you on. It will just be there—whether it’s
through a high-speed landline to your home or a wireless link to a mobile. When
a child sees an odd-looking bird through the kitchen window, it will be faster
to take its picture with a digital camera and send it to a website than to flick
through a book, he suggests. “Being always on, the Net will be woven into the
fabric of our lives,” Pearson says.
His argument is that a difference of degree will create a difference of kind.
Saffo, too, sees this happening, though in a different way. The notion of
distance will disappear altogether as always-on access to the Net becomes
ubiquitous. “In cyberspace, there’s no difference between two points,” Saffo
says. When mobile technology reaches maturity, this will become true as never
before. “Already, nobody on this planet knows my location,” he says. “There’s
really no `here’.”
So business over the Net will continue wherever people are. Saffo sees two
consequences flowing from this. “You’ll be surprised and amazed when you can’t
get e-mail,” he says. “And we’re all going to travel more.” To back up this last
point, he tells of two people—one in Los Angeles, one in
Bangalore—who were introduced by e-mail, hit on an idea and raised tens of
thousands of dollars of seedcorn funding. Then they decided to meet. Saffo sees
this as a model for the future.
His view runs counter to the received wisdom that phones and e-mail will
replace travel. Research he conducted a few years back showed that the number of
miles travelled on aircraft and “communication minutes” keep in step with one
another. “If you talk to somebody on the phone and e-mail them enough, it’s
inevitable that you will want to meet face-to-face,” he argues.
Pearson focuses on the disappearing significance of place. The ability to
“travel where you want to—virtually” could have huge ramifications, he
says. Today, countries are defined geographically, but there is no reason why
people shouldn’t get together in “Net countries”. To some extent, such
communities already exist on the Net, but as more people gain instant access,
they could acquire real power.
Imagine a single-interest group of a million green activists. All could
receive information simultaneously, via e-mail, and their response could be
coordinated on a website. “They’ll be able to organise far quicker than a
traditional government,” says Pearson. Setting up protests by cellphone and
website has already started, as we saw in Melbourne, the City of London and in
the European protests against high fuel prices last month. Are these tastes of
things to come?
Perhaps most paradoxical would be a group that protested against technology
itself. “The likelihood of a backlash is high,” Pearson argues. “People might
start to resent just how much change is happening.” It could be a protest over
artificial intelligence going too far, national sovereignty being eroded by the
Web or the overuse of face recognition software. It’s happened with
biotechnology, he says, why not with information technology?
One issue on which Pearson and Saffo disagree is whether paper money will be
replaced by an electronic version. That ID chip in your mobile could easily
carry a unique number that would be used to open your personal electronic wallet
on the Web. And if it had a Bluetooth chip, too, that money could simply be
squirted to, say, a restaurant’s till after a meal.
Pearson goes even further. Electronic cash could be labelled—so a
child’s money could be assigned to “school dinners” and not be used for anything
else. Or money once owned by Britney Spears could become a teenage
collectable.
Saffo is not impressed. So far, electronic money has been a complete failure,
he says. Pearson sees this as a typical American attitude. Europe is much
further ahead than the US in its thinking on mobile technology and, with its
national borders and plethora of currencies, has a more urgent need for a
cybercurrency.
Smart cards that can be charged up with money are big business on mainland
Europe, and it’s a small shift from a smart card to a smart phone. Using a phone
would also be more secure. Lose a smart card and the money stored on it goes
too. With a mobile phone, the personal number stored in the phone would merely
give authority to move an amount from one account to another. So if the phone is
lost, the money isn’t.
“Most electronic money schemes have been run by small companies,” says
Pearson. “But if AOL and Microsoft decided to create a cyberdollar it would be
recognised all over the world. Then you’re really talking.”
These are just a few of the many potential futures we can expect. And we
haven’t mentioned online games and interactive TV, which are attracting big
money, or the next generation Net, which promises extraordinary advances such as
tele-immersion and The Grid
(see “Being there”).
Deciding which ideas will
really change our lives is difficult, for now. But we may have answers
soon—and again, they’re going to come from Finland.
Together with IBM, Nokia and the Finnish telecoms company Sonera, Digia is
putting a billion dollars into “The Virtual Village”. Covering 3 square
kilometres on the edge of Helsinki, the village will house 12,000 people and
more than 700 businesses. All aspects of urban life will be accessible via a
cross between a cellphone and a PDA. Every building will have fibre-optic cables
linking it to the rest of the village and the Net, while base stations will
serve the residents while they are on the move. “Most of the applications we are
developing will be very practical,” says Sivonen. “Applications that will
improve people’s quality of life.”
The plan is for “villagers” to use their PDAs to file their taxes, check what
their children will have for lunch, courtesy of the school’s website, watch TV
or challenge a Swede to a game of Doom.
The Virtual Village already has 4000 residents and the fibre optics are being
installed. In a year’s time, it will begin life as a showpiece of revolutionary
technology and a testbed for ideas. It could give the first inklings of which
services will really catch on and which are destined for the scrap heap. Nokia
is investing in fast prototyping, so that when it hits on something people are
keen on, it can give them more of it, and quickly.
For those who succeed in picking the winning ideas, riches await. It’s going
to be an exciting, fast-changing world. But spare a thought for the people left
confused, bemused and angry. Joining an anti-technology group is one option. But
Panu Korhonen of Nokia has not forgotten that there’s a much simpler way out for
the disenchanted. “There is always the off button,” he says.
