These are some excerpts from an interview with Brian David Johnson who is a futurist and engineer at Intel. As such has is looking ahead at computers in the year 2020. I found a few of his comments to be really interesting.
This line in particular is something I talk about here often.
Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected
What he is talking about is Disaggregation! We have had all these systems built up in order to manage and organize people and resources. The Internet will strip those away and allow much flatter management structures. This is good news for most of society but bad news for management.
Another good quote is this one:
Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we do productivity-wise, but even more it connects us to the things and people we love.
You can really see this now. Our computers are getting much better at seeing things, hearing things and sensing things in general. In the future, your computer will know everything about you and eventually it will become a part of your existence. Think about it, how many of the phone numbers on your cell phone do you know by heart? Probably not many. We use technology as extensions of our minds.
So will any of this affect education? Ohh yes it will. I read the other day that there are on average 14 levels of management between a teacher in the classroom and the Secretary of Education. That is a huge amount of inertia and bureaucracy. It’s also a lot of jobs that will be eventually not needed.
Disruptive innovation is coming.
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Imagining Tomorrow’s Computers Today – ScienceNOW
Future of computers from Intel
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Brian David Johnson is always looking ahead. As a principal engineer and futurist at the world’s largest chip manufacturer, Intel, he forecasts the interaction between humans and computers, using insights from a variety of scientific fields, to help the company’s engineers and product developers. He says he’s currently focused on the year 2020.
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Science fiction based on science fact gives us a language to talk about the future. It triggers people to think about this future, whether they like it or not, what they are afraid of or excited about.
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Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we do productivity-wise, but even more it connects us to the things and people we love. Siri, the personal assistant built into your iPhone, is an early example of that. You literally talk with your phone and it can talk back to you.
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An interesting study by the University of British Columbia published in Science magazine last July showed that indeed we are off-loading our memory to our devices. It is already happening, they said. We have lower rates of recall to information but higher recall rates for access to the information. And what they also said: This is not new. We have been off-loading our oral history to books. That is not bad—it’s progression.
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