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Interviews A Global Intelligence If I were granted three wishes one would be to reset my body back to 20 years old, take my brain and experience with me, and restart my career. In the past 30 years I have been deeply involved in IT and the unimaginably rich fields of circuit, software, interface, system, network application and service design. The outcomes have been both exciting and beyond the wildest imaginations of most. From the deployment of undersea telephone cables linking continents, to the realisation of mobile networks, multi-media environments and logistic systems able to adapt to chaotic change, the goal has remained singular. We have now realised a universal, affordable, and life-enhancing IT network that embraces the planet. So what happens next €“ is there anything exciting left? Oh yes! The next 30 years will see a far greater advance in the base technologies and applications of IT than the previous 30. With increasingly intelligent and networked machines we can expect to see solutions to many of the problems that have plagued our species for millennia. Machines have always magnified our abilities be they muscular or mental, and networked machines will do so even more dramatically. From the decoding of the human genome, to the mining of medical records, and the design of better vehicles, networks have an increasingly important part to play. But there is a new economy of bits emerging that will eclipse the old economy of atoms, and this is where the real challenges and excitement lies, and it is where the global power of BT has to focus. It is €˜nice to talk€™, but it is even better to understand, and when we do €“ I will spend another wish! |