As spectacular as the impact of recent technological advances have been, so the technological change itself has been less tangible than in decades past, and in many ways has remained invisible to the world’s poor and marginalised.  We are still flying around in aircraft that look pretty much the same as those built in the 60s and 70s. Cars too haven’t changed much, at least in a structural sense.  And many of us live in homes that don’t even warrant the adjective technological.  In fact, some people may wonder where the flying car is, or the jetpack, that we were promised by futurists back in the 50s.  Notwithstanding such disappointments, technological progress has of course been tremendously spectacular: it just needs to be expressed in numbers, in ones and zeros to be precise, as opposed to jet packs and rockets.  

Firstly, the performance of computers has been improving at exponential rate for several decades.  Moore’s Law, which states that the price-performance of semiconductor chips will double every 18-24 months, still holds and should continue to hold until 2015 at least. To put this into perspective, in 1990 the fastest supercomputer was a machine called the NEC SX-3/44R.  It could handle about 23.2 gigaflops per second, which translates into 23,200,000,000 operations (or calculations) per second. Today’s PC chips manage about five times that performance and the fastest supercomputer today is a monster, aptly named ‘Jaguar’, that has a theoretical maximum performance of 2,33 petaflops (or 2,33 quadrillion calculations per second).  Jaguar is being used mainly to model and simulate complex, dynamic systems such as climate change and the enzymatic breakdown of cellulose (which is useful to improve biofuels).  In another ten years, you should be able to access the power of petascale computers from your laptop or portable screen.   

 

The question is, will this exponential growth in processing power continue beyond 2015-2020?  Not if we stick to the current integrated circuit technology, but continued progress could be possible if transistors manage to be built at the optical or molecular level.  Indeed, futurists like Ray Kurzweil are betting that exponential growth in computing performance is likely to continue well after 2020, which in turn will lead us to a point where “machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and non-biological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.”  Whether these predictions are more science fiction than science is hotly debated, but few will argue that the pace of technological change is increasing and that the potential impacts of future technologies are mind-boggling.  

 

The second major dimension on which to evaluate recent technological progress is the network. Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users, is often used to illustrate this point.  Take the internet.  According to Internet World Stats, there are more than 1.8 billion internet users worldwide, which is about 26% of the world’s population.  That is an astounding thought: as an internet user you are a mere email away from a quarter of the world’s population.  And the number of internet users continues to grow rapidly, especially in the developing world.  But a number of other things are happening too.  Firstly, people are increasingly accessing the web via mobile devices, which is one reason why the developing world is coming online rapidly at present.  The PC is gradually losing ground as our primary internet access device.  Instead, the internet will be accessed from multiple devices including TVs, e-readers and portable screens.  Secondly, all sorts of other systems and devices are being connected to the net, including vehicles, household devices, industrial machines, electricity networks and—obviously—databases.  The internet, in other words, will soon be everywhere, embedded in the devices and products around us.  Include the number of ‘things’ coming online and one is again talking about huge growth: huge growth in the number of users, whether organic or non-organic, and exponential growth in the volume of data all this networked activity is generating.  

 

The third dimension is data, the absolutely phenomenal growth in the volume of data that we are generating—and more importantly, what we are doing with this data.  The deluge of data is due to the fact that there is so much new digital technology in use today, such as smart phones, PCs, sensors of various types, websites, video, etc—that generates data; while simultaneously the price-performance of data storage technology has improved immensely.   According to market research firm IDC, the ‘digital universe’ in 2007 is estimated at 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes) and is growing at a compound annual 60%. This means that the digital universe is predicted to increase 10-fold in size over the next five years.  Interestingly, the ‘digital shadow’—i.e. the digital data generated about us on a daily basis—now exceeds the amount of digital information that we actively create ourselves.  But while it is individuals who are the prime creators of data, it is companies and organisations that are responsible for the security and privacy of that data.  Obviously, organisations are not simply storing all that data; they are trying to put it to good use via software.  By deploying analytical software to make sense of their data, companies are optimizing their supply chains, understanding their customers better, and are detecting all sorts of trends that could impact on their business.  Much has happened in the world of software too.  For one, the algorithms that underpin software have got a lot better.  But the process of developing software is changing too, mainly due to the success of the open source model and what one could describe as the ‘platformization’ of software.  

Taken together, the above three outlined technology trends are changing the face of this world, or rather, accelerating the pace of change in this world.  People and machines are gaining instant access to huge amounts of information; information that is analysed and mined for insight by ever more powerful computers, in real time.  This means that decision cycles are getting shorter, that people, machines and organisations are reacting quicker to the many triggers they are exposed to.  It also means that we are able to deploy human and machine resources at a much vaster scale.  It is via network technology (and open source principles) that software development projects like Drupal, which involve thousands of developers around the world, or knowledge projects like Wikipedia, or distributed computing projects like Hadoop, that harness the power of thousands of computers, were able to get off the ground.  

The pace of change is not incremental; on the contrary, it is intermittent, sometimes accelerating, sometimes reversing and then moving on again, perhaps elsewhere.  Often the accelerator is a ‘platform’ of some sort, which either is a standard or set of standards (a common way of working) or a toolbox, or a combination of both. The internet is the most obvious example, although the actual platform is probably more accurately the TCP/IP standard, which is the common language in which computers can communicate to each other and start exchanging all that data.  It caught on and in compliance with Metcalfe’s law, the rest is history.  

 

The internet is the platform on which electronic mail was built, and later, the World Wide Web, which is, rather simply, a system of interlinked documents.  Simple it may be, but the Web is the cradle of Wikipedia—which is transforming our knowledge system—and also the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which are currently transforming the way we communicate and navigate information.  And the social networks are in turn the platforms for the burgeoning social gaming sector.  

 

As the IP network extends to electricity networks, a new platform will emerge: the Smartgrid.  The electricity networks today are dumb, hierarchical networks, pushing power from large centralised power stations on to the high voltage electricity network, down to the distribution networks and into the home.  But this model can cope no longer with the fact that renewable energy sources are being connected to the grid, at the level of the transmission network (e.g. offshore wind farms) and at the distribution network (e.g. homes with solar panels).   Hence, the grid needs to become ‘smart’—it needs to be able to balance out intermittent supply and demand and to do that it needs more data, about users’ consumption (hence expect the installation of smart meters in our homes) and about supply (when will the wind blow).  But that is simply the first phase.  Once the Smartgrid infrastructure is in place, it could, if the network owners allow it, spawn a myriad of new services built by 3rd party providers.  By tapping into the vast amounts of data being generated by the Smartgrid, developers should be able to come up with new applications for home owners and business to manage their energy use more intelligently, which in turn will generate more data, which in turn will create opportunities for new applications, and so on.

 

These are just a few examples but there are numerous emerging platforms for innovation at the level of the network (e.g. Alcatel-Lucent’s vision on Application Enabled networks; Smartgrids), devices and hardware (e.g. iPhone, iPad, RFID), software (e.g. Drupal, Google Apps Engine, Microsoft Azure), social networks (e.g. LinkedIn) and data (e.g. the UK government’s open data initiative).  It is difficult to imagine where this will take us in the decades ahead, especially with regard to the impact of future platforms, the form of which we can only guess at today.  

 

Entrepreneur and technology guru Peter Hinssen is currently engaged in an interesting thought experiment where he explores the limits of digitization.  He surmises that we are only halfway in this process of digitization and that in many areas we are reaching a transition point where change is no longer incremental but structural.  This insight is abundantly clear to companies who are currently seeing their industry and business model being disrupted.  But one can pose a similar question about the role and workings of government, and also about the way we, as individuals, work, learn and think.  

 

A pertinent question therefore is: are we ready for such change?  The World Economic Forum, in its Global Competitiveness Index, talks about a nation’s ‘Technology Readiness’, which it describes as ‘the agility with which an economy adopts existing technologies to enhance the productivity of its industries.’  It is an important point: a country’s economic competitiveness is not simply about inventing new technology, the classic picture one has of a high-tech economy.  It is much broader than that; it is also about using technology effectively and dealing with the social and business implications of technology.  For example, how will we deal with the privacy and security implications of ‘big data’?  How do companies and organisations best integrate technology in their business processes and business model?  How do we begin closing the digital divide? How do we deal with the moral issues and new risks associated with genetic research and synthetic biology? And how do we, as human beings, deal with the monumental but somewhat subtle change in the way that we engage with information, in the way we communicate, and even in the way we think?  Technological progress in the past decade (and the likely progress in the coming decade) has been phenomenal.  Airbus showed us a spectacular new passenger jet.  But that wasn’t the real technological news.  The real news is the exponential growth in networked, processed data that is humming away in the background, in the networks, in data centres, in machines, in devices.  It is largely invisible, but it is changing our world and ourselves in more ways that we can imagine.