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Technology Visionaries Scope the Future
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October 08, 2001 (Computerworld) -- Video games that transcend Hollywood movies and play roles in education and literature, golf balls with embedded tracking systems, computers that understand spoken language with 100% accuracy. What technological developments can we expect in five or 10 years? What's cool, but unlikely to arrive that soon? And what are we neglecting? Freelance writer Mathew Schwartz recently interviewed IT watchers Ed Colligan, Michael Dertouzos, Gerry Kaufhold, Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman, Jef Raskin John Thackara, and Carl Yankowski to get their prognostications.
What is one big-impact technology or concept you think will happen in the next five to 10 years?
Colligan: We will have devices that will be wafer-thin; have high performance, always-on access to the Internet; and sport beautiful, 24-bit color screens where we can receive real-time audio and video virtually anywhere.
Yankowski: Mobile videoconferencing from a handheld computer.
Norman: The role of games and simulations together [is] going to be very powerful, and [they] are therefore going to play a role transcending Hollywood movies and moving into other areas, such as education and literature. People seldom take computer games seriously, but games are starting to reach a form of richness that approaches literature and movies.
Nielsen: Big, high-resolution monitors. IBM has already released a 3,800- by 2,400-pixel monitor with a resolution of 200 pixels per inch. This model supposedly costs around $20,000, but as with all hardware technology, prices can be expected to drop substantially with mass manufacturing. I would expect to see monitors with around 4,000 by 3,000 pixels at a 300 dpi resolution and a price below $1,000 in 10 years. With pleasant high-resolution screens, we may finally start seeing the death of paper.
Raskin: Head-mounted or eyeglass-mounted displays. There are two size-limiting factors in making a product both usable and small: input and output. We don't have any really good solutions to the input problem that don't require excessive training to use, but even the tiniest cell phone could have computer-screen resolution and be able to browse ordinary Web sites with a head-mounted display. The early adopters will get a lot of ribbing [for wearing those displays], but we'll soon get used to seeing people wearing them.
Kaufhold: I believe that nobody is going to want to carry any extra equipment on their person. So the cell phone gets a small color LCD screen and a smart-card reader and uses Bluetooth or 802.11b to wirelessly communicate with nearby services. The cell phone also works as a normal cell phone for voice communications. When you stop for gas, it pays at the pump, all based on a smart card plugged into a cell phone. When you plug the smart card into a "heavy" client like a computer, the broadband network uses the information on the smart card to go find your preferred desktop look and feel and also connects you to all your current data files.
Dertouzos: Without question, it's spoken-language understanding and dialogue. I mean that as opposed to dictating a very long stream and having the computer understand it. It's a natural, human way of communication. The progress has been very spectacular and continues to be, and we are at a level now where the understanding is high—97% [accuracy]—if the context is narrow.
I expect it to be used primarily in the business transactions of retail goods [and] catalog-buying. You can call a store and ask, "Do you sell woolen sweaters sized XXXL?" So they'll answer your query. And I expect it in obtaining government information, such as these numbers you call to get tax forms.
What one new technology would be really cool but is perhaps unlikely over the same period?
Yankowski: A new technology that would be extremely cool but is unlikely to happen would be the ultimate wireless home network. It would have to be low cost, easy to install, truly interactive and have clear and adhered-to standards for audio, video, PCs and other appliances and devices.
Norman: My favorite is speech understanding. A lot of people would say we're going to have it next year. We already have systems that are pretty good . . . but understanding words is the easy part. Understanding language is the hard part, and we don't know how to do language.
Colligan: A golf ball with an embedded tracking system, so I know exactly how far I am from the pin using [Global Positioning System] technology and so I never have to lose another ball again.
Nielsen: In the software realm, it would be very cool to get protective operating systems that would guard users' time and direct them to the best resources while shielding them from information overload. However, this is unlikely to happen within 10 years because it would require the computer to have a higher degree of understanding and situational awareness than we are likely to get. Twenty years are another matter, though. Eventually, computers will take on the role of a good secretary and protect their users.
Raskin: The ideal input device, probably just beyond our present technology and science, would be a noninvasive, direct mind-into-computer communication device to bypass the use of our muscles as input devices. We'd get speed, ease of use, and it would be a tremendous boon to many people who have physical disabilities that keep them from using computers efficiently.
Thackara: Collaborative health. The health machine does four things: diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, prevention. But the missing link is collaboration. We need to be co-creators of our own wellness and health. To a degree, such a transformation is already under way: The collaborative evaluation of health information on the Web changes power and knowledge relationships to a stunning degree. But . . . I fear the institutional inertia of the medical professions, drug companies and governments may well prove too much for Net-enabled collaboration, however obviously good the idea may be.
Dertouzos: The assent to meaning. Currently, we're dealing with computers that are very syntactic, low-level; we have to specify exactly what we want, and when we search, we really have to search literally for what we are looking. Now imagine computers making a small jump in their ability to comprehend what you're saying, first a little, then a lot better. While you can't achieve perfection in computers recognizing everything we ask, we can certainly move way the hell above where we are now.
Are we going to miss the boat on some killer technology that should be attainable?
Yankowski: Yes, I think the retail market is missing the boat on the e-wallet. In five to 10 years, we could have a truly secure, pervasive e-wallet, with credit cards; bank accounts; identification including driver's license, passport, corporate ID and security cards; electronic keys; and much more. It's going to take years to set up the infrastructure to handle this.
Norman: The real ball that is going to drop is in the political domain rather than the technical domain. For example, there will be decisions about intellectual property, cryptography and standards.
For instance, look at our cell phones. They're more expensive and less reliable than those in Europe, and we have competing systems and competing standards because of the fight between local carriers, long distance and satellite companies. We have the possibility for major advancement, and it's stymied now by political and business arguments, though mostly political.
Nielsen: Right now, user interfaces assume that all actions are free because you own the computer and have paid for all the software.
In the future, many more aspects of computing will have a price tag attached, often in terms of real money. Software may be rented over the Net, and content may require a micropayment. All links aren't created equal. Some will cost a nickel, and others will cost a dime. And one may be rated very highly on an independent reputation-management service. Lots of questions, but nobody is working on these problems.
Raskin: We're definitely missing the boat on interface design. There's nothing wrong with 30-year-old technology, like today's [graphical user interfaces], so long as it works. But nothing irks us more than the gross annoyances visited on us by [Microsoft's] Windows, Word and other present system- and applications-level interfaces. We know how to fix them, but it will take most of the next decade to get around the corporate inertia that keeps us mired in the bad old ways.
Thackara: I'd say e-learning is ready to implode. Fantasies of a technological fix for education are highly attractive to some politicians. They dream of a vast, semiautomated learning machine. They are beguiled by talk of an "emerging electronic university," a "unified global marketplace for ideas," "anytime, anywhere learning," and "Web-based knowledge exchanges." Most of the e-learning pure-plays went bust, as they richly deserved to do.
Kaufhold: The real changes that need to be looked at are not technology, but how do the business models, government agencies and social groups figure out how to make the world a better place, when we have more technology than we actually need?
Dertouzos: I don't see any such thing now that looks promising and people have put aside. As I look at the key areas—nanotechnology, biogenomic semantics, speech, speech meaning, automation, robotics, genomics and the link between genomics and computer science, and ability to link the structures of the genome and biological processes with computing—we are putting, I think, a lot of resources into all of them. Perhaps you might say that the time has come for us to try and build a gigantic, distributed brain, where we build pieces of it at various universities around the world. But we don't know enough to do that, so we would have to go in there blind. But things can come out of left field, like the World Wide Web. You've got to leave an opening.
Schwartz is a freelance writer in Arlington, Mass. Contact him at Mat@PenandCamera.com.
Who's Who
Ed Colligan: Founder and chief operating officer, Handspring Inc., Mountain View, Calif.
Michael Dertouzos: Late director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT (Died Aug. 27)
Gerry Kaufhold: Principal multimedia analyst, Cahners In-Stat Group, Newton, Mass.
Jakob Nielsen: Principal and co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group, Fremont, Calif.
Donald Norman: Principal and co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group
Jef Raskin: Author of The Humane Interface and creator of the Apple Macintosh
John Thackara: Director and firstPerceptron, Doors of Perception, Amsterdam
Carl Yankowski: CEO, Palm Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.
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