On 27th Sept I am giving my 14th and last ‘State of the ICT Nation’ presentation – The Last Time – for The Prince’s Trust. It’s been a sellout for many months and the total raised will then have breached £1m.
As in every speech I end with a ‘one more thing’ prediction. This time I have chosen to present a view of what might have happened in our tech world when I hit 80 – in 2027. I’ve incorporated several of the predictions that HotViews readers submitted to my request in May – See Progress?
My 2027 world starts with me coming back as a hologram. Indeed I’ve used illustrations from Star Trek’s Holodeck (from the 1960s!). I see this technology being used for everything from entertainment to business meetings to consultations with your doctor. I go on to incorporate one of the predictions made by a reader that all street furniture/signs will be redundant; replaced by headup displays for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. By then the ‘Internet of Things’ has exploded so that everything from chickens through to the pills you take are ‘connected’ – maybe a trillion such ‘things’? All, of course, meaning that data stored rises from today’s 2.7 zettabytes to…
Yesterday, Virgin Media Business provided its guess. “The amount of data stored by 2025 is expected to explode to a staggering 100 zettabytes – that’s the equivalent of 36 billion years of HD video or approximately eight times the age of the Earth”. Big Data becomes Massively HUGE DATA.
I don’t think in the history of HotViews/News that I have recommended readers to stop for 4 minutes and watch a video. But PLEASE watch Welcome to Generation IP:2025 by Virgin Media Business. It is superbly well made and contains visual interpretations of many of the seemingly far-fetched predictions I will be making. “Imagine a world where you don’t go to work to work; where collaborating with thousands of people you don’t know and will never meet is a regular occurrence; where a personal avatar keeps you in check and the doctor prints personalised medication remotely to a 3D printer at home”. Yes, I can!