In which our hero doesn’t attempt to make any predictions of his own, but rather criticises predictions that other people have made.
(from the utterly fabulous paleofuture.com – Going to the Opera in the Year 2000 (1882))
Ok – the predictions that have provoked my ire are the ones over at Techcrunch, who I’m sure are lovely people and we’d get on like a house on fire were we to to meet socially etc. It is a piece entitled
Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
1) The Tablet
Forget it. No one can be arsed with tablets. They’d need constant propping up if you used them in bed, on the sofa etc etc… on the train… in the car, they’d rest against the wheel and be constantly setting the horn off. You can really only operate them with one hand while holding them with the other. Everyone with a tablet will need an laptop as well. And an iphone probably.
2) Geo
Bollocks. The only people into this are breathless “early adopters”. No one wants everyone to know where they are 24 hours a day. No one wants to be Geo-Locationally Advertised at. (Or any advertising at all for that matter). It’s one of those things that might be useful on very rare occasions, but the rest of the time it’s a gross intrusion.
3) Realtime Search
Rubbish. Have you seen it? It’s a panicky rumour-mill.
If you suspect something might have happened to a celebrity etc, you can already search with twitter – and find a load of wild, flying rumours… so you know something must be up. Then you need to go to a proper news service with proper fact-checking – ie: the BBC, The Guardian, or Al Jazeera to find what’s actually true… or at least official. Even the Iran Election thing became very suspect, very quickly – which I went on about at the time here.
Truth does not necessarily confer competitive memetic advantage.
Remember, we’re not looking at an information service here, we’re looking at a memosphere – It’s good for finding out what the buzz is… but precious little beyond that. An aggregation of “real-time-search” results is just a broadening of the number of sources… but it’s still basically like sticking your finger into the Tiber to find out what’s going on in Rome.
4) Chrome OS
Not unless it starts coming out on specific devices.
Ok – there’s a killer-app waiting out there : the full-fledged-unfettered web, on smart-phones. That’s it. IPhone’s App Store is an abomination. That degree of top-down control over what a device can or can’t do is as immoral as DRM. It’s a crime against God. Against freedom of information.
Sooo… This could be Chrome’s angle. It could also be HTML5’s angle.
5) HTML5
Yea. Right. You do know that IE6 is still the world’s most popular browser don’t you? And has been for several months?
The trouble with the web as delivered via a PC’s Browser, is that web designers have to code for the lowest common denominator… a fair few sites now are refusing to support IE6… but it’s still out there, and it’s still big… and… HTML5? I think it works in IE8 doesn’t it? Dunno.
So… again, the only reason I can see this coming earlier than the demise of various versions of IE, is if it’s driven by a killer app – and personally, I’d guess that the killer app is bypassing app-store restrictions on mobile phones.
6) Mobile Video
Can’t we already do this? I guess it could improve/get better etc. Streaming protests straight to web could be interesting. I think there are possibly quite interesting possibilities to do with first-personism in robots as well.
Ok – so I don’t really disagree with this one. A basic-rule-of-thumb/law-of-nature is “whatever speeds up the memosphere, wins” and this speeds up the memosphere. Speeding up the memosphere is The Prime Driver of social change, and has been for 1000s of years. Speed of communication changes everything.
7) Augmented Reality
Balls. A solution looking for a problem. It’s coming… in one form or other… but this idea that people are going to wander round tourist resorts holding an iphone up to their faces so they can have the nearest Starbucks location presented to them is utter bollocks. Won’t happen. It’s Boo.com level of imagineering.
One use I can imagine is “product bar-code reading” so you can go into a shop and see which products you’re supposed to be boycotting and why. Possibly useful for on the spot reviews as well. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it took off as the basis of some sort of game – eg: real-life “Hot or Not” for real life stalkers etc.
But the bottom line is that you need to wander round with a cellphone held up to your face. Plonker Alert, Plonker Alert.
8) Mobile Transactions
Maybe – this was attempted with SMS about 10 years ago but the telcos killed it because they were too greedy for it to be viable – wanted an insane commission. They use cellphones for paying parking metres in Estonia, which is a brilliant idea – you get a text when you’re running low etc.
As for Mobile transactions… maybe, there is that dongle thing that’s shown up recently… and somebody described a competing system… maybe as a joke, but it’s not a stupid idea. Not stupid at all.
There’s also the small matter of phones already being used as an alternative currency in Africa – where people read out pay-as-you-go codes over the phone – so you can transfer money back to your family.
I’m not going to be dismissive of this one because a change in the way we do currency is probably going to be THE big way we change in this century – the scale of it is beyond anything like a top-ten list. The ability to make transactions via phone is a very real possibility for how this will work… and is a ripple of warning on the surface… the ability to transfer non fiat-currency value via phone is the tsunami.
9) Android
Yup – I’ve been rooting for this for a while. See 4.
iPhone is the AOL of telephones. You can’t do anything with it without getting some boring fuck’s permission. Fuck that.
But that’s… geek-power against killer-marketing, and most of the geeks I know have already gone for the iPhone. Android is on the rise, but it’ll be slower than… well, it won’t “rock 2010” – not unless a real curve-ball turns up… something like Google offering pay as you go Android phones for free in exchange for advertising… or something. The future is dominated by curve-balls.
10) Social CRM
Yea whatever. Who cares about corporations?
I don’t know that I want to have anything to do with anyone who knows what “CRM” actually means… if twitter can provide the shortest route to talking to an Actual Human Being (who Actually Knows What They’re Talking About or is Actually In A Position To Help) then well and good… but… twitter is about People-to-People… or Product-to-Fanboy.
So… if the fundamental relationship between a corporation and a customer changes, and becomes much more about two people talking together as people… then this is almost certainly one of the areas which this change will show up in.
I don’t know if this will happen though – because so many corporations are fundamentally evil. Sorry Yes-men, they are… and you can tell they are, because they’re constantly doing evil things. They have evil in their DNA, so their people can’t relate to their customers as anything other than through a type of legal-wall through which heavily excised protocols ring. Scripted Turing-Test Conversations.
So I’m sure that they’ll try… and if I was to make a prediction, it’s that there’s a huge blow-up because a corporation that has committed crimes against humanity or the environment attempts to engage the memosphere, and gets eaten alive.
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
That last sentence reads like my current dream.
My only outstanding question is…. What do we do with all the momo heads who currently work for Evil Corporations!?
I’d heard that after the crash in the UK, a lot of City people were going into teaching – and were a lot happier for it.
I used to work in the city – they’re not bad people on the whole – they’re just really, really aggressively focused on this game and are insulated from the consequences of their decisions. It’s the institutions that are evil, not (generally) the people.
Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
8. There’s also the small matter of phones already being used as an alternative currency in Africa – where people read out pay-as-you-go codes over the phone – so you can transfer money back to your family.
Jct: Should have been number 1.
OH, Most Evil Corporate employees may indeed be wonderful. Honestly didn’t mean to throw down aspersions in front of them at all. My question was really about what the currently employed peoples might do with their time and how might they occupy their 60 hour work weeks? With the vapors of illusory Shovel-Ready-Green-Jobs?
It’s all got to play itself out, I reckon.
It’s not actually big corporations that employ the most people, it’s small-medium.
Back when I was a kid, and my Grandmother’s generation owned all the houses… NOBODY didn’t have a vegetable garden. Only husbands went out to work. All of the backyard fences had doors cut in them so you could pop over to the neighbour’s place. Less prozac was taken etc etc.
I don’t think the problem is so much the potential loss of jobs/income so much as the unchecked rise of costs-of-living, such that in the space of two generations, we’ve gone from a husband supporting a family to both parents having to work to both parents having to work and it STILL isn’t enough.
So yea – it does have to play itself out… but I’d tend to focus on the Finance-Real-Estate-Insurance (aka FIRE) industry induced slavery-lite being the problem, rather than the sudden glut of free-time.
“what the currently employed peoples might do with their time and how might they occupy their 60 hour work weeks?”
Jct: Have a neighbor hood gathering for people with the same spare time, make a list of the things you can do of use to others as they do for you. This is your LETS directory. Pick how many local currency units per hour (recommended 6UK Greenpounds, 60 Greenfrancs, 20 Greenmarks, 12 Greendollars Canadian and $10 Greendollars US per Ithaca Hour.
List accommodations. a private room getting 5Hours from the UNILETS world right now.
Put your LETS list online and let us know you have beds to offer.
Now all your members can travel and stay everywhere there’s a LETS timebank, actually, anywhere there’s someone who’ll take your emailled public IOU. See my rudimentary http://johnturmel.com/unilets.htm but still functional 1-person timebank IOU and UOI account.
Steller points. I no talk gud. I mean what do the large masses of soon-to-be no longer overly occupied people actually do with themselves in order to make money to live, after their any-sized Evil (no longer relevant) jobs are dissolved? Can we really evolve millions of individuals into better directed energy? That’s my question.
“to make money to live,”
Jct: To get food to live, to get clothing to live, to get shelter to live, to get life support, that’s the question that has been distorted into “make money” to live. Presuming you have no marketable Hours in your community as a “rocket scientist.” Suddenly, like all citizens, you can log on to the FED (Treasury) or the Bank of Canada, open a time-based account, cut checks to settle all interest-bearing debts so all payments go against principal thereafter. Everyone saves the interest, only the private banks shut down.
Are you really going to miss them when everyone has a national or UNILETS credit account? So everyone stops paying interest and everyone has more money and everything works better for everyone, the rocket scientist too.
The way I see it, we’re in a transitional phase… and I can’t see us getting from where we are now, to something approaching stability in less than a generation or two – purely because we’re so indoctrinated in the way that money/value works.
As far as I can see, the current monetary system has a couple of inbuilt weaknesses that are coming to a head – and this current crash is one of several. In addition to that I think that it’ll only be a decade or two before energy production de-centralises to the point where it’s “free” enough to cause another really serious bubble – all of which is a further driver to people getting off-grid.
As far as people meeting their hierarchies of needs goes… I’m not advocating dissolution of the capitalist system, I’m advocating breaking up the monocultures within it – ie: the big cartels and the big corporations. As small companies together employ more people than big ones, this will likely lead to an increase of employment rand than a decrease.
Alternatively it could all crash – and we could wind up like Russia but without the stability of housing, and the pre-existing kitchen-garden culture. If things get to be this bad then a major concern is how to manage/maintain a socially accountable monopoly on violence. Sadly enough. Someone graffitied my car yesterday. It’s the beginning of the end I tell you.
“I can’t see us getting from where we are now, to something approaching stability in less than a generation or two..
I’m not advocating dissolution of the capitalist system, I’m advocating breaking up.. It’s the beginning of the end I tell you.
Jct: It may seem like the beginning of the bad end because you focus on “breaking up” the malfunctioning system which will take generations. I focus on “reprogramming” the malfunction at the click of a button knowing the world’s banking systems engineering can be upgraded to the UNILETS Time Standard of Money at the switch of a disk for whole databases, see Facebook Acebucks as a rudimentary mini system. So my strategy is to focus on building, not breaking up, and aiming for a solution tomorrow, not in a generation or two.