December 01, 2006
The future of communications
"In 50 years the scene will be transformed. Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesises the important points, with references to the original literature. People won't think of "search" as a separate category - it will all be part of living".
This is how Peter Norvig, director of research of Google, describes briefly the future of search, in 50 years, for the special report of NewScientist on how life will be in 50 years. The changes described in these few words imply such a great technological change as we have never experimented before. Artificial intelligence, computers everywhere, information that goes with us wherever we go, voice communication with computers... They are all in various stages in the research laboratories of several leading institutions throughout the world, and they will change our life in the near future.
Think about your social interactions a decade ago. The role that mobile phones had in shaping your daily life, and your main sources of information, the number of people you contacted each day... Write them in a piece of paper. Now come back to today and write in the next column the equivalent communication standards. Think about the deep changes: how wide your contact network is, the amount of information you receive and process, the sources itself (do you read the same papers, watch similar TV shows...).
A deep change in society came with changes in communications and media. The changes that are just about to come are so important that probably our interactions in the next 20 years will create new forms of society that are difficult to predict, only with subtle changes in small parts of our life, like the ones you can identify with a two minutes list of activities.
Posted on 1 December 2006
Comments
What technology will enable us to do in the future (and not too far away future) is amazing and even scary. New technologies for image identification, voice recognition, etc. will make us even closer to information. This, aligned with Google's vision of storing and managing all the internet's information makes me wonder how far can Google go? Are there any limits? Posted by: Javier Lecanda at December 9, 2006 11:22 PM
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