A visionary look into the Year 2000 and beyond

By the year 2025 there will be more machines online than vertebrates on this planet, and we will become the insignificant communicators in a mere decade. But should we feel threatened when it is our technology that has allowed us to understand and do more. It is the building of that better microscope, telescope, and model that allowed us to enhance our intelligence. We are no longer competing for survival with other species, but we are competing with the machines.

Two hundred years ago I could have been a pre-eminent zoologist and engineer at the same time. Actually I know a little bit about optical fibre, software, and psychology, but my desire is to be eclectic, holistic and omnipotent. I would like to have some doctrine of operation, to understand everything, and to be everywhere at the same time. So my vision is of a future partnership between carbon and silicon - between man, woman and machine.

As individuals we increasingly know less, and realtively speaking we know nothing, we have no education. If you are an engineer you probably know a little about the law. If you are a lawyer you probably know a little about medicine. If you are a medic you probably know a little about technology. And yet we are trying to cope with all of these things, and far more, at the same time. In a world where all of human knowledge is now estimated to double in less than a year - we all know and understand less and less.

So far we can repair human beings by implanting technology. Four total paraplegics in North America have had chips-implants inside the brain and are now able to control computers by thinking. There have been dozens of failed experiments of implanting artificial retinas into the human eye and just two partial successes. There are however hundreds of thousands of people with cochlea implants - integrated circuits embedded on the inner ear to restore hearing. So people are now walking streets that are, to all intents and purposes, cyborgs, part human and part machine. Respiratory stimulators, pacemakers and artificial hearts are now commonplace. This is all extremely crude and a first step in a direction that we may wish to sustain, and includes the inherent ability to remotely monitor peoples health at all times.

As we are go into the 21st century some people will choose to have transponders fitted under their skin. These devices are carrying our entire bank balance, passport, driving licence and medical records. Those who reject this technology may then rapidly become are part of a sub-species - homoludditus - to will be sidelined by people who rapidly subsume technology and use it to full advantage.

When I was born in 1946 people would wait in line to watch an A-movie, a B-movie, cartoons, travelogue and Pathe news. They would do this three times a week, but we don't do this anymore, we are far too impatient. We have become besotted by the instant gratification of the screen and get irritated by a few seconds delay. Seven seconds delay from pressing a key to something to happen is intensely irritating. It is too short a time to do anything else but it is long a time to wait.

I have a 100Mbit/s LAN around my home, a 50Gbyte server and a 1.5Mbit/s Internet feed. Can you imagine what my children complain about? "Dad, when are we going to get some serious bandwith around here?" And they are absolutely right! Our physiological limit is not 100 - 200Mbit/s, it is over a 1Gbit/s, and until we get Gbyte feeds we are going to be dissatisfied.

From millennia our species have sat in front of the fire of an evening and watch the flames. Over the last 50 years we have sat in front of the TV, and there is a marginal increase in the information content. But Digital TV is about to change everything. It is not about a better picture and better sound, it is about being able to record and capture and buy everything that comes on the screen. It is about being able to interact with a network at large.

We have now a world where all the values are turning upside down. We now see Lara Croft selling Lucozade - an artificial human being replacing the real thing. Only five years ago computer generated people were crude, but not anymore. And when you think of computing power doubling every year; so 20 years from now they will be a million times more powerful, and in 30 years a billion times, we will soon have artificial people better than the real

Copyright is a concept coined by monks with quill pens and parchment, but in a world dominated by bits and networks it has no future - the bits will always find away of escaping or being accessed. So the future is about access right not copyright. In the last few weeks the encyclopaedia Britannica has gone on line for free. If all the movies and sound files also go online for free, then the market size will escalate from millions to billions. The reason: the whole economic model of creating, changing, producing and delivering bits and the way that people get reward is going to change.

Why do governments, administrations and managers have trouble with all of this? Because it is happening faster than anything we have seen ever before. A new mind-set is required to contemplate the death of geography and distance, with assets fluctuating faster than ever before. Everything is now information intensive, with chaos the natural mode. People are only just beginning to realise that the atoms have being sidelined and the bits are starting to rule. The time to industrialise was actually very short. The time to create an information economy was a mere 15 years in the USA. We will do it in Europe faster because we are able to learn from their mistakes. In this world it is worth remembering that experience is only a relevant parameter when the paradigm is very static. If you are mining coal, creating oil or manufacturing cars - no problem, but if you are going to move into the dotcom space almost everything that you learned and hold true is irrelevant.

When I was a young man the UK government thought, it was not a good idea for us to listen to continental radio. They considered commercial radio and TV to be some kind of evil and they refused to license stations. So we soon had pirate radio ships anchored off shore, and eventually the government collapsed on the issue, along with CB Radio and a few others. Right now groups of people are looking at buying oil tankers, to be anchored off shore in international waters as floating server farms. Satellite dishes on the deck will allow the to trade and do anything they like, and Governments have got no say and no play in that space.

Why do I go to my office? Not to work - but to be interrupted! I have to work on aircraft, in cars and hotels, and I go home to work. I go to my office to be with people to interact. The way we work and achieve change is now very different than just 20 years ago when an employer might have lasted for 50 years, a job for 15, and education may last 20years. Today most employers are lasting around 10 years. Employment is lasting around 5, and education in science and technology - you will be lucky if it lasts 5 or 7 years. But worse is to come, it will get faster, and we have to rethink the way in which we work and live. We have already created a two-class-society. It has nothing to do with birthright or blue blood. Some people spend huge amounts of time to save a little bit of money. Whilst others spend any amount of money to save a little bit of time. I can no longer afford to buy an apple because the opportunity cost is huge. I can only afford to buy apples by the crate. Think about it. How much money could you earn while you stood waiting in line buying an apple. It is absolutely prohibitive. I can no longer afford to do gardening, house decoration, maintenance, car cleaning or shoe cleaning. I have had to outsource all of those things.

This is all part of my life experiment trying to live 10 years ahead to see what happens. I work for BT; I work in academia, I do start off companies at the weekend, broadcasting, write for newspapers, professional speaking and consultancy too. What I am trying to find is the flight envelope for this human being. What can it do with the aid of technology? In the last 10 years with progressively powerful computers I have been able to increase my work output tenfold. How did all this happen? Simply Moore's Law - an astonishing trajectory that sees technology doubling in power every year. And this will continue for at least another 20-30 years with what is in the laboratory now. To quote Richard Feynman, "There is plenty of room at the bottom." We have not done anything significant yet with our integration or indeed our knowledge of the quantum world, and when we do, we will find it to be very different.

Around about 2003 the Internet will eclipse the phone network, and around 2013 it will eclipse the GDP of this planet. How? Economists continue to erroneously calculate the GDP on the basis of goods and services delivered. It should be calculated on the basis of an entropic measure of value. That car you might have purchased in 1950 does not resemble in way shape and form that car that you will purchase today. It will use half the weight of materials and provides you with a 1000 fold performance. Nor does that GDP-figure take into account the trade in bits.

The average American girl has 5 Barbie dolls, and the next generation are going online. Ergo, soon there will be more Barbie dolls online than Americans. How come? The cost of chips will go down by at least an order of magnitude and will be like digital confetti - in everything and everywhere. Today there are well over 20 billion machines on this planet and only 6 billion of us. Over 40% of all network traffic is machine to machine and does not involve humans. By the year 2010 95% of all the traffic on this planet will be between machines and will not include you and I. We will become the insignificant communicators.

The telephone network of old coped well with a world that was random. People making 3 or 4 phone calls per day at random times for 3 or 4 minutes duration resulted in a peak to mean ratio of traffic of about 3 or 4:1. But in the chaotic world the Internet the peak to mean ratio is over a 1000:1. The only systems that can cope with chaos are very low and flat, essentially without hierarchy, able to solve problems and make decisions quickly, and able to adapt to change. This is bad news for governments with 35 layers of management and companies with 7 or more. Companies we have no choice - they either delayer or die.

The really bad news about this chaotic Internet world is that death comes rather fast and often from a unexpected direction. A company that dominated a market space for 50 years can die in 2 if it does not see the threat from another sector. In telecommunications we have copper, fibre, radio, geo-stationary and low earth orbital satellite systems. There are now groups in America and Europe looking at balloons which will come in at a thousandth of the costs of orbital platforms launched by rocket. Then there are pilot-less aircraft, very low cost drones, able to act as orbital platforms above cities. So my own industry is in tremendous turmoil and under tremendous pressure to change even faster.

Looking at other sectors - banks are so easy to destroy - money has already disappeared, there is only bits. If you actually look at the transaction costs it is very simple. At least a dollar transaction cost at a branch building, and only 10 cents on the internet. End of the story, I think.

Imagine every barcode being replaced by a transponder. It would do so much for logistics and quality control at every level of society. Take retail for example. You find jacket, but the trousers don't fit and you walk out of the store - no purchase. But supposing the shopkeeper could tell you that the trouser that really will fit you were available in a store 300 miles away and he could guarantee that they were delivered to your home by FedEx the next morning. Then you would make a purchase.

Image that deep pan pizza with a transponder. You put it into the microwave and the microwave says. "What are you?" It replies: "I am a pizza." The microwave says. "How long would you like me to cook you?" and it says; "three and a half minutes." Think about it, why would you want to read what is on the box and take important decisions on burning food?

A world with chips in everything will also destroy the insurance industry. If someone decides to steal my VHS I just wait for them to plug it in I will find it online, and so will the police!

The chip cost of your car is now greater than the metal cost. Soon the software cost will be greatest, and will include a hard drive so you can download music as you download atoms - gasoline! Computer games and videos straight into your car so you can take them home and upload into your home net. So much for CDs and tapes! I carry 2400 MP3 music tracks on my laptop, and all ripped from my CD collection. If only I could buy just the 3 or 4 tracks per CD that I really like instead of wasting money and storage space on things I never listen to.

Let us now examine a growing threat to the telcos. Supposing we live in a community and we go down to a store and buy small radio units for 300$ and nail them to the side of our homes. The antenna is omni directional and transmission ranges near 500 metres at a bit rate of 25Mbit/s. A unit starts transmitting in a random fashion and the signal spreads across this network hopping box to box throughout the neighbourhood. Gradually it searches out and finds a route to the Internet. It the signals back and closes down all the extra links. This is all without a network company or any central control.

Suppose we now extend this principal to people. A lady is out in the country and wants to send a message from a low power communicator built into her jewellery. But she is out of range for any radio system as the device only transmits 15m. Sooner or later someone passes by, picks up her message, and continues transmitting until they get into a neighbourhood where there are terminals available. At that point the message starts to go on its way and it will now hop human-to-human, building to building, device to device. It could be that this lady is in a bit of a hurry and she wants her message to the other side of the world the pretty quick and she is prepared to pay for a uplink to a satellite to get there.

Who survives in all of this?
"Not the strongest, not the most intelligent but the most responsive to change." Charles Darwin

A very astute observation from only two generations back, from a man working with nature who could not have imagined how prophetic those words would be in a world so technologically different to his.

We have to be the most responsive to change.
So here are a few messages to take remember for the 21st Century.

• The bits rule the atoms
• There will be more things than people online
• Chaos is the natural mode
• Hierarchies don't work
• Death comes as a surprise - and from a unexpected direction
• Don't underestimate the opportunities!