The Next Great Thing

A while ago, a professor posed the question, "What is the most important invention of the last N years?" where N was probably 25 years.

At the time, I said the web, or perhaps the browser. I've blogged about this before. It's not simply the browser or the Web, but search engines and content providers, i.e., the places you can visit on what used to be called the information superhighway (thanks, Al).

How has this transformed our lives? We're now more savvy about things. Not only do I read conventional news sources such as the Washington Post online, I read less conventional sources like Reddit. Combined with email, which was the last great thing before the web, I have friends who send me links to interesting stuff to see. Now I get far more information than I would have otherwise.

As I've blogged about before, this hasn't made me "smarter", if by smarter, one uses a traditional math-y definition, whereby I can solve hard problems. I can't. Instead, I collect information that's easy to digest. Whether that's useful or not, I don't know, but it makes feel more well read.

However, as I clunk through my browser, with its so-so response time (but what a difference speed makes compared to even ten years ago, when loading a page with more than 2-3 images was painfully slow), I wonder, what's next?

To give you an impression of how difficult this is, consider the futurists of the 50s, and what they thought the future was like. Flying cars, automation everywhere, and colonies on the moon. We'd wear jet-packs. However, those futurists weren't entirely ready to forecast how people were going to live their lives, except as extensions of what they see now. For example, would they suggest that people would become hedonists? Or that marriage would dissolve as an institution?

Such things require no technology at all (or does it?), and therefore are difficult to predict. Think of the web. How hard is that to visualize? The ubiquity of the home computer was hard enough to imagine. Who would have thought that a computer would be small enough to fit in a pocket? Who would have thought non-brainy people would want to use a computer.

Let's see a few things that seem utterly ridiculous, but continue to exist now. First, there's parking meters. We still use them as we have for many years. If technology were more ubiquitous, we'd have some way to communicate with people who owned cars and simply charge them as long as they stayed. We could eliminate towing as a business (a pet peeve of mine) using the same mechanism.

How would you invent a new bathroom? This hasn't changed much in many years, yet, one place that has changed a lot is the kitchen.

The kitchen is being reimagined because we have so many appliances, but not much counter space. Kitchens have grown to accommodate the stuff we have.

The way to imagine the future, I suppose, depends on how you envision now, but that can be very challenging, because new ideas often spring out of places you least imagine. Remember mail-order used to mean 4-6 weeks? If it takes more than a week, the company is out of business. UPS and FedEx made this new world of delivery possible.

Most people probably envision the next great thing being computer related, whether it be wearable computers (essentially, the IPhone, the Blackberry, the Palm and all manners of PDA are starting to make that reality) or the more traditional laptops. For example, it'd be cool to see a rollup computer, that allows us to display content on large pieces of foldable something, with the resolution of high quality books, but the dynamism of graphics.

Ultimately, I imagine the next big step is figuring out how to make us better. The Matrix imagined that we would plug in and get new information injected into us (why they didn't fill themselves with useful information all the time to make people smarter than machines, well, you can't analyze the movie too deeply).

If someone can really make breakthroughs in how we learn, and I don't necessarily mean meaningful learning, but even how to use Microsoft Office, they might move on to something. How do we improve as people?

Science fiction writers used to think about this issue too, that eventually, it's not just technology as tools, but how people change, and indeed technology itself doesn't explain everything.

Here's a simple thought. Consider working women. Once upon a time, we asked women to stay at home and cook and clean and rear children. Offices were male-dominated. Now that women do work in great numbers, their need to be married is far less. It's perhaps no surprise that divorce rate skyrocketed when women had the capacity to live independently of men, and it has lead men to a more egalitarian role with women. Even so, for whatever reason, women do tend to still be more emotional about things, and so this has meant men have learned to offer placation. Will this attitude change?

I recall the pilot episode of Star Trek where they imagined a future, several hundred years from now. Captain Pike was meant to be a throwback to, well, the 20th century, and even then, to the 1950s in particular. He said he wasn't used to seeing women in positions of command.

What world did he grow up in? Well, that of the 50s of course. His comment was a comment about the period the show was made, not about someone who truly imagined what starships with women would be like, that it would necessarily involve seeing equality of opportunity throughout, and so forth (though it would have been intriguing to show that indeed, a small percentage of women still had power even hundreds of years in the future).

Predicting how men relate to women is difficult. One place that will become fascinating to watch is India. Where the 1960s saw women entering the workforce in large numbers, in jobs that weren't secretarial nor teachers, women began entering the workplace in the 1980s in India. This has begun to change the way some women and men interact, especially in the cities.

However, there's a balancing force and that is the numerous small villages throughout India that still are bastions of conservatism. What will happen in 20 years or 30 years? And India is not isolated from the rest of the world. They have the web, they get Western entertainment. How does it compete against the Indian culture.

Indeed, one fascinating part about culture is how much it persists despite the constant bombardment of entertainment. Women in Indian films often wear jeans and tight clothing, yet, this does not translate to the average woman who would have to deal with disapproving men in their lives. But is that so different from Americans? When we see Paris Hilton and like revealing a little too much in their clothing, do we imitate them and do the same? Not really. Something else informs our decision to resist what we see.

And despite all the technological advances, people seem to greatly underestimate how things have changed for them because so many other things have remained the same.

So, if we can move out of an era of fear, then it will be fascinating to see what the future holds for us.