While the economy totters, the great and the good of the world of technology converge on Las Vegas. It seems that the gambling capital is revealing the one dead cert for the next decade. If you think it’s amazing how technology has changed the world, then we would say this: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
They are all at it. Bill Gates was busy telling the BBC that the way we interface with the Internet is set to change dramatically, with the keyboard and poor old mouse set to join the fax machine on the almost-obsolete list. Instead, the next decade will see the emergence of touch, speech and vision interfaces (not sure how a vision interface would work - Ed).
You may have seen his demonstration on the BBC yesterday. The world’s second-richest man demonstrated a tabletop screen, in which the user could control TV, music selection, videos, and probably shopping, from a kind of high tech coffee table.
Meanwhile, Paul Otellini, the top man at Intel gushed out his enthusiasm on what he calls “a personal net.” He predicts that a range of devices will emerge, each with at least the processing power of a current PC, offering their own “specialist features,” but which will all interface to the Internet. And in his Arthur C Clarke moment said, “Instead of going to the Internet, the Internet comes to us.”
“Our business model is one of very high risk,” he said. “We dig a very big hole in the ground, spend three billion dollars to build a factory in it, which takes three years, to produce technology we haven’t invented yet, to run products we haven’t designed yet, for markets which don’t exist.” Ummm, wonder if he could have got that business idea past the rich boys and girls in Dragon’s Den. “I see Mr Otellini, but what I want to know is have you got distribution in Boots lined up for this product that doesn’t exist yet.”
It’s very easy to be cynical about technology, but the truth is, it’s Brits’ cynicism that has held back the UK industry. Only in America could you hear so much optimism, so much willingness to throw money at products that don’t even exist on paper. Google could never have got off the ground in any other country, (remember, its founders didn’t even know how it would generate revenue when backing was secured) and the same applies to today’s social networking sites.
If you read Alan Greenspan’s book “The Age of Turbulence, Adventures in a New World,” the sprightly 81-year-old refers to the impact of technology over and over again, talking about how technology is lifting productivity, leading to the modern day environment of low inflation and facilitating low interest rates. You just don’t hear that kind of talk from the UK’s central bankers. He also says how Bill Clinton, when he was President, was a great advocate of this principle, arguing that productivity data must be flawed as it did not reflect the changes in technology.
And while we criticise Mr Greenspan for helping create too much debt, it could equally be argued that in an economy which is seeing rapid technological advance, there is a danger that demand could lag behind supply. Imagine this, all factories everywhere find they can produce 5 per cent more goods; there would then be a danger of insufficient demand, and recession could set in.
This is not just a theoretical argument. In the UK during the mid-19th century, the revolution that was the rail-road explosion transformed the UK’s infrastructure, but instead of the rail network creating a business boom, as you would expect, a very deep economic depression followed.
While we might think the world is changing rapidly around us, remember that the first few decades of the last century saw an even more radical change. Surely the mass usage of electricity, the telephone, and the motor car represented a much greater change than the Internet and yet, in the 1930s, just as these new technologies should have been approaching true mass market acceptance, economic depression followed.
Moving forward, it does appear that the rate of change is changing. Change is accelerating. Actually, this acceleration is itself not new. Consider the evolution of life, and then the story of Homo sapiens. Both stories are characterised by a very slow beginning, and an ever-increasing rate of change. The 24-hour clock analogy for explaining evolution applies over and over again. You know the one? The one that asks you to imagine life on earth as represented by a 24-hour clock? Humans would have appeared at around five to midnight. Then do the same with human history; the construction of the Pyramids and the Industrial Revolution would have occurred very close to each other, very late at night. The same applies if you look at the history of technology.
If you look at the history of economic growth, you will see a reflection of this change, with growth moving at a snail’s pace for millennia, picking up in the 19th century and then picking up by even more again, and then again in the 20th century.
We are sitting on the verge of a hugely dramatic change in the way technology impacts upon our lives, but as history tells us, in order to convert this change into prosperity, demand needs to be boosted, and that, “My lord,” is the case for the defence of Alan Greenspan.
