Upon 2020

Interesting take and very consistent with my series of posts on how computing is moving all around us:

I truly believe that the models of human-computer interaction (”HCI”) that all of us grew up with are going to change dramatically in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. … the iPad is such an important device [because] it is a decisive break from the keyboard/mouse paradigm that we’ve been living in for 45 years (yes, the mouse is over 45 years old).

Add the “watch” paradigm of the TV, but which is not natural either.

The iPad makes electronic things touchable — if you think of it, a much more natural way of interacting than a keyboard or a remote control or a mouse. And because it is portable and can be put anywhere, and can act as a remote control, it becomes part of the set of everyday things around it, instead of being “a computer”.

Of course it’s a V1 device, so we have to overlook a few things as Eric says. But five years from now … transformational.

So far I’ve looked at devices with which we’ll interact with information in 2020. Now I’m changing gears to look at the backend.

Fry’s is selling Terabyte hard drives for $69.99 this week. A Terabyte is, give or take, a billion pages of text, or a million books. An entire library. Or a month’s worth of video. At the current rate, give or take, we’ll get a factor of at least 100 ($0.69 per Terabyte) by 2020; chances are it will be all solid state memory instead of spinning disks, but I don’t care too much about this distinction in this blog. I do care that we will also get substantially higher communication bandwidth and better broadband coverage by 2020, which can be used to instantly access more storage in the cloud. Note that much of the need for storage on client-side devices is driven by a lack of good high-speed connectivity: if I can easily get at my iTunes collection over a network, there is not need to carry a copy of it in my pocket, a major driver for client-side storage needs today.

Together, this means that by 2020 we’ll essentially have unlimited storage capacity for free on our personal devices for any foreseeable application. I’ve been attempting to come up with applications that require multi-terabyte storage on a client-side device, and have come up with basically nothing. Visual input is the highest-bandwidth input channel to humans, and there is no way even a single terabyte is insufficient as a cache to a high-speed communications link for video. Sensors on devices are unlikely to produce higher-bandwidth data either.

If we go into the realm of the very speculative, we could think of some wearable health monitoring systems (like “portable MRIs”) that could possibly produce higher data rates, but for a variety of reasons I think those are unlikely by 2020.

So the price points for client-side storage will gradually approach zero because there’s no need for higher-priced storage on the client. One lesson to draw: you won’t get rich as a vendor of client-side storage in 2020.

P.S. as usual, please tell me that I’m wrong if I am!

I was thinking the other day how Apple now has a contiguous line of screen sizes from 30 inches down to just a couple of inches (Desktop Mac, MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iPod nano). They don’t do TVs, so there is still room at the large end. But they have all other sizes covered.

So if I were Apple, and there aren’t any screen size holes to fill any more, what new device would I come up with?

I can think of only one, and that may turn out to be the most important of all: smart glasses. Heads-up goggles that is, using the same form factor that has worked well for glasses for centuries.

My understanding is that in 2010, nobody has technology that could do that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the following chain of events occurred through 2020:

1. 3-D movies like Avatar are a huge hit, so mass production of 3-D screens commences (already happening).
2. Computer desktop monitors go 3-D and the main Mac Finder / Windows Explorer user experience becomes 3-dimensional. (In the past month, the first 3-D monitors have gone on sale at Fry’s, at a rather reasonable price. I think this one is unstoppable.)
3. People get used to wearing glasses to look at monitors (they are needed for the 3-D effect), and the monitor manufacturers are bundling them with their monitors.
4. Then they might as well incorporate Bluetooth audio in the 3-D glasses. They sit on one’s ears already anyway, and it helps with watching TV in a room with other people.
5. Now the stage is set to make the glasses smarter: first, only a few pixels might be projected into the glasses. Perhaps the volume control indicator for the audio, or an alert.
6. They will also start to connect to one’s cell phone, so one can use the Bluetooth audio already on one’s head to take an incoming call. And before we know it, we’ll keep wearing the glasses even when not looking at a 3-D screen.

Of course, this is total speculation. But I’m quite certain we’ll have intelligent glasses, even if it takes a long time there, and this adoption avenue sounds plausible to me. They will then be the last screen we’ll buy.

The Economist writes (apparently quoting this pronouncement) that:

By 2017 there could be 7 trillion wirelessly connected devices and objects — about 1000 per person.

Personally, I think their timing is off: I can believe that the hardware can be built by 2017, but not that we figured out how to manage or use them. But regardless of the exact date, it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Look around where you are sitting right now. With this vision, in a few years, at least a hundred should be in sight right now.

The other day, I’m looking out the window on the street in front of our house, and see this elderly couple walking by our house. That happens all the time, of course, but this was different: both of them had Bluetooth headsets on their ears.

They looked like they had been married for a long time, like they were retired, and they were on a very normal afternoon stroll through the neighborhood. They didn’t look like the people who were on an urgent conference call while taking the kid to the park. Or like they were expecting a must-take call any minute. (both of them?)

They looked like they put on their headsets every morning as a matter of course, calls or no calls. I do that, too, some days, when I’m expecting to be on a bunch of calls and on the move (because I always misplace my headset on the move). But I don’t do it as a matter of course. And they were a generation older than me.

There is this transition between when something is a tool that I may or may not use, to something I attach to my body and in a way it becomes part of me. The transition to becoming a cyborg.

I figure our cyborgishness is growing exponentially:

First, our ancestors augmented their bodies with clothes to keep warmer, and put on shoes.

Glasses, for those who need them and could afford them.

The next one must have been the watch.

Now everybody has a cell phone. Not sure it qualifies as “part of us”.

But now we are apparently permanently adding headsets to our ears.

My guess is that augmented reality glasses will be next. Separate post on that.

One step at a time to being cyborgs. Perhaps more than one in the next decade. And all without a public outcry.

Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing yesterday:

According to the [court] filings …, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when …[a] child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.

This is what I meant. Times a hundred.

P.S. Gotta love that vice principal. You sort of wonder just what exactly students learn at his school.

The iPhone form factor is here to stay: it’s about the largest possible device that still fits into a pocket, and unless we all change our dressing habits in 10 years (unlikely), we’ll carry a device with that form factor.

It will be improved, of course, with more memory, more sensors, more connectivity options, more situational awareness, more data feeds, better screen resolution and so forth, but it will be very recognizable with what we know now.

It will still make and receive calls, and we’ll still use it to look up information such as a map of our surroundings.

It will also become the hub in a hub-and-spoke system of communications with smaller devices we’ll also carry. Today’s Bluetooth headphones are the first example of that. More in a separate post.

Kindle started the trend, and with the iPad now it is clear that books are gradually going electronic, just like music before them.

A few months ago, I banned all music CDs from our house, because all they did was collect dust. We had not touched a CD for years as iPods and iTunes took over. Looks like soon, we won’t touch many books either. Certainly the stack of magazines we read is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. It will be zero in 2020.

I’m sure I have a few books in our collection that won’t be available electronically in 2020, and we can’t rip them easily (unless Google really speeds up scanning …) So I’m not expecting an outright ban like for our CDs. But perhaps our house could do with 1000 or so less books than today. Imagine what we could do with all that space!

But more importantly:

• Barnes & Noble stores will go the way of the local Blockbuster.
• Public libraries … perhaps become glorified cyber cafes? Or iPad rental stations? Or go away? Shiny new public libraries worth millions may turn into obsolete dinosaurs much faster than city planners are suspecting.

Eventually, electronic books will also change the school system as we know it. Teachers, at least in the middle and higher grades, already have lost their traditional monopoly on knowledge. There are many students now who know much more about particular subjects than their teachers ever have.

But now image the future text book. iPad and the like will make it possible to go beyond copying the paper into PDF format, so to speak, which is what many electronic school books do today. It just the first step, like putting the equivalent of putting static brochures on the web, as many businesses did in the first years of the web.

Next-generation textbooks will make use of their always-on internet connectivity:

• to dynamically change the way they teach things based on what works better, based on real-time feedback from their customers
• to incorporate current events as they occur, e.g. for social study subjects
• be dynamic, e.g. let students interact with a (virtual) science experiment and see what happens.
• put more detailed reference information into hyperlinks everywhere over the book, for the more interested students
• add collaboration tools for more interesting (non-rote) homework…

The possibilities are endless. And at $499, and falling through 2020, very much viable given the cost of textbooks.

Strike off another “cultural institution” — books — for the dust bin. Unlike recoded music, books go back to the beginnings of civilization and in a way define what is history and what pre-history. If this is the end of books, perhaps we are now truly entering post-history.