Paul Saffo's vision of the future at ebic

Uncertainties, hindsight, contradictions and technology failures were cornerstones of eminent futurologist Paul Saffo's riveting keynote speech, at TFPL's ebic conference in Berlin, as key indicators of what looms on the horizon: 

• When predicting what the future holds, look back twice as far as you’re looking forward in order to identify trends and analogues. 
• Never diminish uncertainties when looking into the future – they are key indicators. People tend to see uncertainties as risks and we are all generally risk averse and often neglect their consideration in our forecasts often resulting in inaccurate predictions.
• Big change is hard to see, technology pundits are often wrong twice: when a new technology they champion fails and when it succeeds a number of years later after they’ve discounted it.
• The information revolution is over and the personal media revolution has dawned. 
• When a technology becomes successful it transforms into a medium of entertainment with the mobile phone as a prime example with 10% of the online music industry being comprised of ring-tone sales for consumer entertainment. 

It takes 20 years for a technology to take off after its inception and this often happens with the introduction of complementary components, for example: 

• TV took off 20 years after the introduction of widespread broadcasting technology in the 1950s.
• The internet and email became ubiquitous in the late 1990s with the inception of the WWW, the client-server and peer to peer vehicles.
• Habitat: a failed 1980s virtual world precursor to the thriving 2000s Second Life.

There has been a shift from mass media to personal media. Personal media is what is now driving online technology. Paul underlined this point with reference to the fact that David Letterman's rant  about John McCain's interview cancellation was viewed many millions of times more on youtube than the TV broadcast on CBS.

The Characteristics of Mass and Personal Media

                                   

	Mass Media	Personal Media
Medium	TV	The Web
Location	Living room	Anywhere
Interaction	Watch/consume	Consume, participate, create
Broadcasted by	Few Mass Media Outlets	Many millions of individuals
Model	Product/Service	Subscription

Personal media has some way to go before maturing in the same way that mass media has, the vast majority of the world' population doesn't even have an internet connection.  At the moment, personal media as such is at the stage of experimentation equivalent to that of TV in the 1950s.  Paul illustrated this with an analogy between Winky Dink (1950s) and weird applications of personal media such as Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

As a result of the personal media revolution we are now moving from the service/consumer economy to, what Paul terms, the creator economy where consumers are also producers (e.g. bloggers, youtubers).

Google has been a success because it's managed to monetise the smallest quantum in a search string; the next industry mover and shaker will be one who successfully monetises single clicks on the internet, as the next smallest quantum.

Sensor technology will be the next step in evolving and further personalising consumer products and is presently embedded on a small scale in a number of retail products, an example being the Nike Plus training shoe. It detects, as an example, whether your pace is fading and subsequently instructs your iPod to switch to a more motivating song. 

The increased reliance on sensor technology will ultimately give rise to the widespread introduction of robotics in our daily lives, which Paul described as a complex series of sensors. He illustrated the potential popularity of robots with anecdotes about people giving their robotic domestic vacuum cleaner, Roomba , names and even taking it on holiday with them!  Moreover, Paul's most revolutionary prediction (as far as I am concerned) is that in 20 years, 50% of all US traffic will be robot driven.  The technology exists: Paul made reference to the Urban Challenge robot car race.