The Future of Tech is Human

What does the future hold? When will everyone's home be a "smart home"? When will access to the internet be free? And how? Will we all eventually be connected to a cloud through micro-chips embedded in our skulls? Will we all some day be on space ships exploring strange new worlds to colonise and to give humanity a second chance?

I do enjoy a good theory about what the future holds. I enjoy it even more when the future is going to look wildly different and be upon us within just a few years or decades. For example, as a kid, I’m pretty sure I was fear-mongered into thinking there wouldn’t be any petrol left by the time I was all grown up. Indeed, a paper I found for the sake of argument speaks of the 2040s as the time around about which we will be “completely out of oil”. Then the more cited estimate of BP in 2014 leads us to believe there’d be none by 2067. And then there are those who argue that same report spoke of identified and currently (in 2014) exploitable reserves, ignoring the untapped potential of undiscovered oil deposits and future drilling technologies. Take this into account and petrol may be available for centuries to come (though at a certain premium, if the technology for drilling is available to only a few major parties).

We can then speak of the decreasing dependency on oil for energy-production, the increasing acceptance of it being a cause of climate change (as if it were a belief and not science), how it replaced gold as, loosely speaking, a symbol of wealth and power, and how other minerals are on the rise, like the exploitation of cobalt as a key element for everyday electronic devices. On the surface, this leads to the notion that technology drives our consumption and that its development hugely affects our lives, but look more closely and it is the other way around: we determine what technology is needed and how to use it. Nuclear energy is a clear example; when we feel threatened, we harness the technology for evil.

Let’s take another, more positive, theory about what the future holds/held: flying cars. I am pretty sure these were meant to be commonplace by now, at least according to Back to The Future. However, we do have something somewhat resembling in the making: self-driven cars. With the likes of Google, Uber and Tesla working hard to downplay the negative press about their accident-prone tech, we find the application of what is a modern technology to a consumer trend: we don’t want to drive as much anymore. It isn’t that big a change, mind you. It is an incremental change following the creation of automatic gearboxes, cruise control, rear parking cameras and self-parking technology; but it also provides for a huge change in how we perceive the capabilities of AI. The drive for technology to be developed, therefore, is not based on what it can do, but what is needed to respond to consumer trends. Take the example of Apple’s "game-changing" iPhone. It was an incremental change to what the Blackberry had to offer, really, adding a touchscreen and access to the App Store. We can say Steve Jobs was a visionary, but we can also make the case that Apple has a heck of a Marketing department, capable of making the world think that it thinks it needs what Apple says it needs, rather than admitting that the people told Apple to make what they told Apple to make (also great Marketing).

The point is simple: technology is driven by perceived threats (e.g.: the unsustainability of non-renewable energy means we have to find ecologically friendly energy sources; the rise in social media as a means for terrorist recruitment requires systems to quickly delete posts; etc.) and by consumer trends (e.g.: sedentary lifestyles lead to us not wanting to drive, so driver-less cars spring to life; we also want great user experiences, so we’ll prefer the touchscreen; etc.).

The point is: technology is driven by perceived threats and by consumer trends

The approach we enjoy hearing, however, is that new technology can and should be applied to everything, a logic by which flying cars would probably already be a thing. This logic also inspires questions such as “what’s next for blockchain?”, which returns almost 79 million results on Google at the time I write this. It further inspires cloud-based everything, the internet of all things and home-butlers named J.A.R.V.I.S. And yes, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, with enough time and fundraising capabilities, this might be the right question, trying to be the first with the fancy new tech; but for the less creative sort like myself, the question is “what current processes are there that can be facilitated by whichtechnology?” Simpler yet: “I have to do X, can some technology help?” And an entrepreneur can take this question on board too: identify a need and find a solution with an existent technology. The difference is that technology is no longer an end in itself or the answer, but a means. And in following the logic that technology responds to our needs, we are shifting our focus on predicting the future from the capability of technology to societal trends, which is by far more interesting. However, that same shift may give us an idea of what is yet to come in terms of technology, as changes and developments may be deemed incremental and subject to consumer trends. Phones are slowly becoming smarter and smaller, voice recognition is slowly accessing more and more accurate data, cars are slowly becoming more autonomous.

The wheel, paper, the steam train, the light bulb, the car, the internet, social media, blockchain. Every new piece of technology has responded to humankind’s base needs to eat, socialise and procreate, whether through Just Eat, Instagram and Bumble or in the real world; technology responds to these needs. The future of technology, therefore, is not at the heart of uncertainty and shouldn’t be at the heart of prediction-making. The future of consumer trends and societal behaviours, on the other hand, as well as much more philosophically alluring and complex, are what should be firstly analysed to get somewhat of a spec of a hint of an idea as to what the future may or may not, to some degree or other, possibly hold. Maybe.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future"– Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics