What does the future look like? More specifically, what does *my* future look like? Lets assume for the moment that the human race really does have a future and that I will be, for a few years at least, a part of that – no such speculation can continue without these assumptions.
There are some things which are obvious. Things are going to change, they have to change. The software industry (indeed, the technology industry) is approaching something of a complexity singularity. Before that, though, the mobile phone business is going to go through a whole lot of changes.
One way or another there is likely to be another wave of mobile phone boom as people buy devices which really do live up to the promise of the 3G hype of 2000. These won’t be the chunky bricks with no battery life you get on todays 3G networks.
But what happens after that? Comoditisation? More and faster? What happened in, say, the VHS video recorder market when it hit saturation?
Once the technology reaches a certain point, people simply don’t want anything more, they’ll only replace their phone when they break or lose their old one. There is a certain amount of user churn at the moment since the operators are constantly fighting to get new customers, this could drive sales for some time, but it won’t last forever.
There might also be another wave as seamless roaming between wifi and cellular networks becomes a useful reality – the funding of this is somewhat unclear to me at the moment. This will probably coincide with soft radio interfaces which will allow devices to be upgraded on the fly as they roam from one net to another, or as stack improvements are developed.
But sooner or later the industry specialisation I currently have will no longer be in demand.
Further than that the complexity horizon of the technology industry is approaching. Many years ago now we passed the point at which one person could keep all of technology in their head at once (polymaths? Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edisson, perhaps even Richard Feynmann), more recently there was a similar milestone for technical specialisations. Now there is no way that any one person can remember even one percent of, say, the design of a modern mobile phone. What happens when we get to the point where we can’t even remember enough to find all the information we need to further our designs?
We are already seeing the first signs of this problem, where companies are concentrating on adding functionality without considering the effect on the products stability. Well designed products will have no stability problems, they will have been designed to deal well with the things that cause instability.
Nanotech is the next big thing on the horizon, but that will suffer the same problems we currently have with electronics, they will be significantly worse since its scale is considerably smaller.
What can we do about this potential problem? We could try making people cleverer, but I don’t think that going to happen anytime soon. We could try being less demanding of our gadgetry, but theres no money in that.
We could design things better. But how? We need better information management, that is clear, computers are excellent, versatile machines which are very good at remembering things and doing repetitive things quickly. We need to be able to harness that power, to fit them into our consciousness stream, to get them to do the things we’re bad at while we get on doing the things we’re good at.
These days they are powerful enough to provide visualisations of both data and processes. However, the software for producing such visualisations is still extremely complicated, difficult to set up and administer, and extremely expensive. As an old colleague of mine would say “it’s a sharp tool, you’ve got to know what you’re doing”.
In days gone by this approach was perfectly valid – the people who could afford (and benefit from) computers were prepared to go through the pain of having to work around the pain for the gain they gave – the people who actually used them were often people who were adept at arcane interfaces and happy to delve in.
Todays computers have lost touch with their users, that schism needs to be addressed somehow.
What can we do to make the tool safe for *everyone* to use? Why does the tools interface have to be arcane? How could we make it so that my dad could use it without worrying that it was going to break?
I don’t know what the answer to these questions is, but clearly visualisation is a large part of it, creating on the screen a picture of a mechanical world. A world that the user can clearly understand. One where the computers model and the users mental model of how things will work are closely aligned.
Would it be possible to build an entire operating system in a such a graphical language? Something akin to UML, but less confusing? Or maybe just presented in a better way than Rational Rose?
So, how do I fit into this future?
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