TECHNOLOGY – THREAT OR SAVIOUR!

INTRODUCTION.

I thought I’d look at some of the advances in technology that are to come over the coming five to ten years.  Some of this is very conceptual, some still languishes in the arena of buzz words and phrases, and some is technology already around but by no means mature.

For the sake of space and brevity, I’ve focussed on what I think are really key developments or potential developments with an eye on the impact this may have on accessibility.  So, very much a snapshot, and by definition, an article full of health warnings.  Technologies of course rely on market forces, major finance, investment, and development time;  a blip in any or all of these can simply eradicate a potential development from the map, or at the very least, send it in a completely different direction.  I’m also here talking about mainstream development – so although I’ll touch on accessibility at the end, this is more about where the world around the assistive technology industry is going.

UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY – ALWAYS CONNECTED.

It is easy to see that the Always Connected concept is coming of age – cell phones with internet access, wireless connectivity of all kinds, synchronisation of data from one device to another … But the concept of ubiquitous technology takes us one step further.  It assumes that technology is smart, connected, and all around you.  To help with this idea the concept of different types of networks operating in different types of ways appears to be taking hold.  “body area networks” are those immediately around you or on your body – clothing might contain, at the very least, smart tags, but very possibly allow a product in one pocket to connect to another product in another pocket;  Personal Area networks are those in your personal space – they might encompass your credit cards, your laptop or mobile phone, and these networks change more than your body area ones as you move from place to place – different devices or systems appear in different environments that you might want to communicate with.

Quite how far these concepts get is up for grabs at present, but there is no doubt at all that over the coming five to ten years, we can expect ubiquitous technology to lead to:

• Accurate profiling: Your products that you use on a daily basis begin to learn how you behave, what you prefer, how you engage with things, people, products … and so they begin to offer you things that you seem to normally want.  If your regular behaviour in the morning is to wake up, go downstairs, and make a coffee of a particular strength, with one sugar but black, your in-house systems or individual product will guess that’s probably what you want to do the following day given you appeared to get up at the same time, and wondered downstairs in the usual way.  Ordering your supermarket shopping, your favourite pizza, the wine you normally buy, begins to become interesting – recommendations are made based on what you appear to like and previous learning (how much you spent, how you interfered with the offer last time, etc);
• Intelligent Agency: the concept that the networks around you (the ones at home, at work, etc) all talk to each other, and share information, but personified by an “intelligent agent” – the face, sound, or visual incarnation of your house or work system.  Not exactly a person, but a helpful interactive technical servant that looks after you and your interests which communicates with you in your prefered way;
• Ambient Intelligence: the idea that intelligence doesn’t just sit in one big box somewhere but is spread throughout the network of devices you use.  Even relatively “dumb” devices can, through connectivity, access all kinds of other systems and services.  Your kitchen devices, for example, might be able to communicate with you in your prefered form – the translation in to synthetic speech may well be taking place somewhere very different rather than your washing machine having to be armed with synthetic speech;
• Smart Surfaces: These already exist in prototype form but have yet to hit the markets.  They are surfaces on a desk at work, for example, which serve as a charger, a connector to the net, a way of operating a nearby device, simply by touching icons, or textures – a kind of touchscreen gone mad really! Or they perform functions for you such as noticing your battery needs chargin in your mobile phone and doing that for you purely because you put your phone on the surface;
• Ubiquitous Computing: Again, still largely conceptual but not far away.  New types of materials lend themselves well to mini electronics and circuitry buried, say, in your clothing, allowing connectivity, identity or even computing circuitry;

All these concepts bundled together begin to point to genuinely “smart” devices – ones that can analyse the world around you and provide you with relevant, timely and appropriate information or behaviour.  Mobile devices in particular already have some of these qualities and devices currently in labs around the world clearly demonstrate some of these capabilities, especially in mobile computing and phones.  Because your phone knows where it is, how fast it is travelling, can take an image of information around you, it can marry all of this up with web-based or networked-informed information.  At the most basic level, real-time language translation becomes very possible.

BATTERY CHALLENGES.

At the moment, every mini technical device requires batteries of one kind or another, normally with a distinct charger of its own.  And often, the battery is the downfall of any product – however amazing, useful, or glitzy it might be – at one point or another, the lights will go out and you have to find its charger.  The race is on for better, faster, more powerful battery technologies, tempered by increasing environmental considerations.  New materials mean that a mobile phone style product or pda is likely to regularly be powered for three or four weeks at a time on a single charge;  and the methods of charging themselves becoming easier, not only with smart surfaces and similar ideas, but more standardised chargers.

“SCRUNCHABLE” MATERIALS.

Materials development is a ke area in technology and “scrunchable” or “foldable” materials are one of the many rages in laboratories.  Whether it’s a screen that feels like paper, or a battery that you scrunch up and shove in to a holder, these versatilversatile materials can store power, chipsets and circuitry, or have particular qualities (reflectiveness, coldness or heat, or moldability).  Materials that “morph” are key to some of the ideas being planned for us – so that they take on new dimensions or properties dependent on what you are trying to do.

HOME AUTOMATION.

This is something that, for some, has been a dream too long in coming and all too often predicted.  Home automation is possible today (for a price!);  but compared to how it has previously been sold, the concept is far from reality even now.  For £120000 you can go some considerable way in automating your home, but today what it normally means is being able to control lights remotely, having home entertainment networked around the house, bar-code recognising fridges (they know when the milk is running out!), and washing machines that wash clothes at optimum times (based on share indexes of electricity) or at optimal temperatures.  But the dream of course is the intelligent agent at the heart of it all – your fridge doesn’t just know the milk is running out but it takes the liberty of ordering you some more before you get home;  or the oven that knows what’s in the fridge and can suggest recipes based on what’s in it;  or, because you are late home from work, and because all you want to do is get in, sit down and watch the telly for an hour, your takeaway arrives just after you get in and your favourite pre-recorded programmes or new box office on-demand film is suggested to you based on your preferences and previous behaviour.  How close are we to that?

We are getting there – in my home we have an intelligent heating system that learns the temperature you like, how long it will take you to get home, and warms the house accordingly;  I have a robot vacuum cleaner which, at the press of a button or instruction from Alexa or Google Home, will start cleaning – it even has a semblance of personality!;  the lights can be altered by asking for it to happen or through an app, and the doorbell has face recognition.  The block in this area of work is a fundamental disagreement around connectivity standards;  for it to work, manufacturers have to trust each other with significant detail around how their kit works – not a very common behaviour.  At present there are many competing standards – untenable to say the least – so unless agreement can be reached, or, more likely, a single entity delivers a solution that is so compelling, others follow, the dream is not quite reality.  But platforms are emerging as current runners – Homekit by Apple, Nest/Google, and a range of offerings that allow interconnectivity – not to mention many manufacturers creating their own ecosystems.

NANO-TECHNOLOGY.

Nano-technology is miniature, miniature, miniature, technology – it is atoms thick, and often not visually noticeable.  At most, it is small enough to float around your body without being noticed.  Nano-technology is the broad term for electronics, or a mixture of electronics and organic materials, that are nanometres thick.  And they are impinging on every part of science in our quest for more power in a smaller box.  But perhaps the biggest innovations are happening in medicine where nanotechnology is being used in, for example, the fight against cancer, or to redress system imbalances.  These miniscule pieces of medication can behave as if they were cells, or support a healing process.  They could be cameras, or recording devices, medical or otherwise.

Nano-technology is a reality today but a very young, and very fast-growing, area of investment.

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES.

A subset of ubiquitous connectivity but I think deserving of mention on its own.  This technology is what satnav is all about – it’s about knowing where you are at any time, anywhere in the world.  This of course is more and more common today but the development within the next ten years will be immense in the rush to give you “value-added” services.  you surely don’t just want to know that you are just outside King’s Cross station, but you want to know when your particular train is leaving and from what platform, or where the nearest coffee shop is, or pharmacy.  Depending on what you are doing, you want different types of information and location-based services are all about providing you with that seemlessly, unobtrusively, “intelligently”.

Death of silicon.

Instead of silicon, we might be talking about “nanotubes” or “graphine” within the next ten years.  It is accepted in most physics circles that we are reaching the end of the natural life of silicon – simply put, we are reaching the maximum capacity of silicon with respect to the amount of calculations a piece of silicon can handle, or, more to the point, the speed of calculation we require is greater than ever and the electrical resistance of existing silicon-based materials is too high to allow for anything much faster than we have today.  So the race is on.  And the search for the next “superconductor” (a super-conductor ideally has zero electircal resistance) is very much the talk of people in the know in quantum physics circles.

Others of course think this is all rubbish! You just put more chipsets together;  we’ve seen what can be done with dual core processors, etc..

So, not sure about this one but what is clear is that the speed of growth will not be as easy to maintain at its current rate within the silicon environment, and there are shortages of production capability currently in some areaas of chip delivery.

3D printing.

The notion of being able to “print” something you need, to a specification and precision you require, is around the corner.  In the biggest implementations, aircraft wings are now “printed” in 3 dimensions, and in the most innocuous, we are seeing small 3d printing facilities emerging at holiday destinations – instead of just a picture, you can have a 3d model of yourself.  But this idea of giving the means of production back to the individual with the potential growth of 3d printing hubs located somewhere close by that will produce, to your design, the specific item you want, is very likely to come about as new materials are developed that lend themselves to this.

Transport And Driving.

The reality of self-drive personal vehicles is close at hand;  with vast amounts of investment being put in by Google and many others to perfect this technology will deliver results very quickly.  Indeed, driverless vehicles are already being implemented – a new bus system in Cambridgeshire, self-drive trains, fly by wire aircraft, are already here, the last being a marketing ploy currently seen as potentially massively negative in the airline industry “people not being ready for it”.

On-Demand And On-Request.

We have already seen the complete transformation of the music industry in very rapid delivery cycles from the traditional purchase of hardcopy music on cd through to subscription based all you can eat models.  That is beginning to impinge on the publishing sector.  And the ability to self-publish anything becomes easier and less challenging for people with no need to know, and no idea of, how the technology does it.

But traditional sales models, library and lending models, are all being thrown in to very new domains where the concept of “lending” is already being eroded and the concept of “licence” changing daily.

Not only is the traditional set of consumption models changing, but that ability to be creative and share with likeminded others is spawning ever-personalisable and specific to the individual offerings.

And as relatively straightforward but very convincing intelligent agents emerge (siri,Amelia, Google,  and many others), and already are being superceeded by a whole new level of system design, human ability can be magnified beyond our wildest dreams.  Amelia is a new piece of software that, on being given an instruction manual to ingest, can be used as a help tool – she “understands” in a way so far unprecedented, what the manual means – and we’ve seen nothing yet!

Brain To Cloud Integration.

Some in Google believe that by 2030, through a conbination of the above technologies, notably nonocell technologies and the ability to integrate wireless in to these, we won’t need to deal with keyboards or even talk or gesture to our devices at all – instead, through thought requests, we will be able to empower ourselves through direct interaction with the cloud.  Far fetched though this may sound, if you begin to worry less about the way in which the human brain does processing, but instead focus on what the inputs and outputs need to be instead, treating the rest as a black box, it is easier to see how that could begin to happen.  Already on the market are devices that, through brainwave calibration and analysis, will allow a person with significant mobility problems to do such things as write on a screen, switch on and off devices and lights, etc, through thought.

Although psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers are still spending effort trying to understand the intricacy of the brain, and how it processes information, the alternative approach is being adopted by Google – forget the detail of what is happening deep in the brain (that is for others to solve);  instead, treat the brain as a black box and only focus on the outputs and inputs it delivers and receives.  By analysing brain wave patterns and the eventual electro-chemical outputs, one can focus purely on how to interpret what comes out or how to get information in.

Banking And Finance.

There is no doubt that the traditional banking and finance models used today are changing at a pace.  From the way in which we pay for products and services (contactless pay, paying by mobile), to the infrastructure that supports payment (Paypal on the highstreet, Apple Pay, Google Wallet), the traditional banking institutions are being left behind.  Similar to what has happened with music and print publishing, where the ability to write processes from scratch by net-based companies are revolutionising these industries, so too are the same processes present in banking.

Medical Innovation.

Through our increasingly sophisticated understanding of genetics, the developments of cell manipulation and growth, the integration of biological materials with electronic circuitry, and the so-called nano-technologies, the exponential growth in new treatment regimes is inevitable.  Rapid prototyping of drug technologies,spurred on by outbreaks of more complex but lethal viruses has already reduced traditional 10-year research and development timelines to 1 year.

Artificial Intelligence.

The idea of creating technologies that are at least as good as humans in evaluating complex scenarios, and then making decisions about them, is an area of development that is genuinely beginning to dawn.  Personal assistants that can book things for you or manage things on your behalf, systems such as IBM’s work with Watson that allow ingestion of enormous amounts of data and making judgments or evaluations, these types of processes being delivered through robot technologies, are all still at very early stages – but the race is definitely on and development moves at a pace.  

Societal Challenges.

We are having to rethink basic moral values and re-consider the impact of what is happening on our lives.  The ethics of revising or interfering with our genetic code, the privacy issues that challenge us daily as we engage with on-line services, the impact of our on-line personalities and the way in which these interact with our face-to-face ones, and the amount of information now available allowing “intelligent agents” to make suppositions about our future behaviours (buying habits, likely income, lifespan), have huge impacts on decision making, insurance, infrastructure planning decisions.  All of this, set against a backdrop in first world nations of ageing populations.  Our working patterns and types of work are likely to significantly change in the west as the new industrialising entities (china, india, Africa) begin a journey that skips several of the processes we went through to get to where we are.  Inafrica, for example, we find the biggest growth rate of mobile to mobile payment services (hard currency being handled at all), or regular transactions in atraditional Indianmarket settingwhere financial transactions happen by phone with the vendor obtaining real cash at the end of the day from the bank.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I’ll leave you to decide if you like the sound of the nano-filled, virtual, inteligent agent enabled, preferences and behaviour monitoring future for yourselves – it might be the last independent unmonitored decision you ever take!