The Future of Almost Everything, page 4
Many Asian countries are better protected from currency attack than they were a decade or more ago, with stronger reserves and alliances, but market power will continue to grow as the process of globalisation steps up a gear, with even greater connectedness.
Future of telecoms and IT
A lot of nonsense is talked in telecom and IT forecasting. The truth is that we are still in the first hour of the first day of the mobile digital universe. In generations to come, it will be said that the real impact of these technologies only came after 2030.
Here is a common-sense view. There are already more mobile phone subscriptions than people on the planet. Over 30% of the world will soon own at least one smartphone – many costing less than $100, with relatively unknown brand names. By 2025, over half of all new smartphones are likely to cost less than $70, with prices dropping rapidly. As outlined later, banks and telcos will be giving smartphones away with free contracts (p. 192).
Vietnam is typical of the next wave of mobile. Wage costs are half those of China, yet 90 million people own over 110 million SIM cards. Millions of people are jumping directly into mobile web without ever owning a land line or having heard of broadband.
Phone calls are so ‘last-century’
The average young person in the UK rarely uses voice calls or email, as old patterns give way rapidly to social media.
The future of telecom and IT will be smaller, more mobile, more powerful, cheaper, faster, and cloud based. By 2025 we can expect total fusion of online and offline life in many parts of the world, with radical changes in consumer behaviour, in retail, personal banking, social relationships, decision-making, learning and entertainment. (See ‘Future of retail banking’ in Chapter 4, p. 188).
How the web will redefine time
The web has made us very impatient – most people in my audiences around the world tell me that they press the back button on a web browser in less than 4 seconds if a web page is slow. That means losing up to 90% of customers in 4 seconds. Even if you don’t lose them, it means that they are irritated. And it follows that 90% of younger web users in developed nations may press that back button in less than 1.5 seconds by 2025. Impatience will be a factor in every business relationship.
The same applies to call centres. Most people hate having to press loads of buttons. Every second matters. Business leaders tell me they consider it a form of personal theft when their time is wasted, and a social crime to install such systems.
Yet in a strange double-think, most of them also tell me that they have installed exactly the same awful systems for their own customers. It is of course a classic case of institutional blindness, and also an act of near insanity, since cheap technology now allows us to detect an incoming mobile number, work out from Big Data who the person is, and why they are likely to be calling, so that the call can be automatically directed to the right person.
Five seconds to double your sales
We need to completely rethink our business relationships in terms of minutes and seconds. Companies that do so will win huge competitive advantages.
So how long does it take to find a shop assistant to help with a question you have? How long to wait in the checkout? How long for the ATM to give you money? How long to complete an online transaction? How long to respond to an email? How long to wait for a written estimate of costs? How long to return a contract?
Expect huge efforts to speed up and simplify the customer experience. Every web page click loses sales. Every second counts. Every additional choice means fewer sales. Instant ID checks will be universal, using biometric sensors on mobile devices, pre-authorised spending limits and instant confirmations.
Voice-to-text will be a standard feature of all business mobile contracts by 2025. Voice messages sent instantly as SMS to mobiles, email accounts, and so on. SMS-type short-length messages will overtake email for personal communications. If you want a lead over your competitors, use SMS more often. Written e-messages of all kinds can have intense emotional power, more than voice or video, which is one reason why we can expect rapid messaging growth.
Telco business models are completely broken
Over 90% of all web traffic will be video by 2025 in many developed nations. It is already the case in the UK that BBC iPlayer, NetFlix and YouTube alone account for more than 50% of the nation’s web traffic.
A single 2-hour video in HD is equivalent to a hundred million emails, tens of thousands of photos or many days of constant voice calls. So forget charging for voice, SMS, web browsing or anything else – the costs of providing such services are dwarfed by streaming video. Therefore today’s telco business models are completely broken. Telcos are becoming one thing: video providers.
Data traffic on mobiles will increase 1000 fold in the next 5 years, on 50 billion mobile devices connected to 5G, running at 10gps. That means an entire high-definition movie will download in less than 3 seconds.
So telcos are making every effort to develop new kinds of business, for example, helping corporations run IT services, providing comprehensive data storage, becoming banks, and so on.
Mobile payments will hit telcos and banks
We are seeing a huge explosion in the number of mobile payments, particularly in emerging markets. One in four adults across Africa are already using mobile money accounts. Africa is re-inventing retail mass-market banking, and Asia is following fast.
The trouble is that a telco may be handling 100 million payments a month on its network yet making virtually no money from it all. Who is really handling those payments? Who is providing the financial statements to customers? Who gets the Big Data? Who owns the customer relationship?
In the UK, over 25 million people will be making mobile payments by 2020. However, these innovations will be held back by customer confusion, caution and habit. Look, for example at the very slow take-up of contactless card payments. Watch out for new mobile payment platforms to rival PayM, which could be used by 90% of all bank account owners by 2017. (See ‘Future of retail banking’, p. 188.)
A billion wearable devices
As I predicted years ago, mobile screens are becoming larger and smaller – with huge debate about optimum size.
Wearable devices have taken off more slowly than I expected, because we have lacked a ‘killer’ application: a really compelling reason to make your shirt, belt, trousers or shoes go digital. Yes of course we have seen Apps to measure things like heart rate, or distance walked, but for most people these are just gimmicks – which is why, for example, Google Glass flopped.
Despite that, more than 250 million people by 2023 are likely to be wearing smart devices such as wristbands recording motion, or smart watches that integrate with mobiles. In many people with serious chronic illness, the balance will soon shift in favour of home-based medical monitoring, whether blood oxygen, sugar levels, heart rhythm, and so on. But this will not be the case for normal, healthy people for a while.
The challenge is in creating huge numbers of low-cost sensors for smartphones and other devices. Hence the research by Google into smart contact lenses that detect blood sugar levels, and transmit results using an aerial of very thin coiled wire. Home health monitoring will be App based (modular), connected to other things like home security. (For more on medical technology, see p. 88.)
Convergence is the enemy of innovation
Convergence is a terrible game for telcos to play: it means that every device converges in price and features. Every phone looks and feels almost the same. Every operating system works in a similar way. It also means that every device is packed with hundreds of features that no one uses.
Convergence is the opposite of innovation. All true innovation is by definition about doing things differently to serve customers better. The lesson of history is that all successful innovations are copied rapidly, as competitors converge onto the same things.
Convergence means that the only way to make your product stand out is on price, since everything else is so similar, and that means a desperate spiral to the bottom on profitability.
So expect hundreds of new entrants into the world of telcos over the next few years, all copying things that work well already, and few survivors. Expect one or two to become household names, growing from almost nothing in less than 5–10 years, winning almost entirely on price alone. Expect huge pressures on profits of today’s telco giants as a result.
Expect the pace of true innovation to slow down in mobile devices, as each becomes more perfectly optimised, within natural limits imposed by the size of fingers, pockets, and resolution of the human eye or ear.
Simplicity will be a survival issue
Most devices are still over-delivering on features that are rarely used by most people, making life far too complicated. A huge reason behind the success of touch-sensitive tablets has been simplicity, which is why one of the fastest-growing groups of users of the iPad has been those aged over 65.
It is a scandal that many IT systems are still sold with software full of bugs, with incompatibilities and failures that would put manufacturers in prison if they were making cars or planes.
I am often asked by IT companies or telcos to gaze into the future for them – but often my message is very different. Go away urgently and sort out the mess you have today in your existing products, make them work properly, and support your customers better, before you embark on yet another series of half-perfected innovations.
Customers will become increasingly intolerant of complex products, and simplicity will be a core value for every successful IT and telco company.
The truth is that despite all the above, the pace of real techno-innovation remains painfully slow. For some years I have subscribed to a large-circulation European magazine called T3. Every issue is supposed to be packed with the latest gadgets and Apps and games and other techno-breakthroughs.
But the fact is that there is hardly enough real news to fill an issue every 3 months, let alone every 4 weeks. Yet another retina-quality screen for a smartphone. Yet another App to help navigate busy streets. Yet another music streaming service. Yet another way to measure the quality of your sleep. Yet another camera with a few more megapixels.
Most so-called innovation is merely copying features on some other manufacturer’s product, or tinkering with the spec of the basic design.
New ways to feed your brain
Many smartphone users already take their phones out to check their screens over 200 times every day, including last thing before falling asleep and first thing on waking. What about tomorrow?
The fact is that the connection between brain and device is far too clumsy and slow. For example, our reading speeds are no faster than they were – actually in many cases they have fallen, since it is faster to speed-read a printed page than one on-screen. And typing speeds are also slower on mobile devices.
Expect intense efforts to find ways to get instant knowledge without having to look at a screen in your pocket or on your wrist. Many people (including me) have been very sceptical about clunky prototypes like Google Glass, but we do need to completely rethink interfaces.
Expect many more types of head-based displays, gesture controls – all of which will ultimately be threatened by direct digital-brain interfaces. The first such devices are helmets for gamers, which use brain waves to control the action.
Many people already have biodigital brains
As I predicted 15 years ago, we have seen rapid advances in the creation of biodigital brains, where brain cells are fused into the surface of chips, and connected to mobile Apps. The first experiments were carried out in 1993, implanting small chips into brains of mice and rats, which were then able to transmit basic thoughts to each other at the speed of light – such as requests for food or drink.
More recently, rats have sent each other mental messages over thousands of miles between cages in North Carolina and Brazil. Several rats were connected at once in a ‘brain net’ so that they could collaborate on problem solving, mind reading each other.
Doctors have already implanted similar chips inside the heads of more than 450,000 human beings, and are implanting chips into 50,000 more people every year. These cochlear implants connect with the auditory nerve inside the inner ear, and are very successful in restoring some kinds of severe hearing loss, without any risks of brain damage, epilepsy or other problems.
Send an email (or possibly an image) by thinking alone
Other experiments have given blind people primitive sight – with chips implanted into the visual cortex of the brain, or connected to the optic nerve inside their eyes. I have met a paralysed man who controls his arm, hand and fingers by thinking alone, not by chips in his brain, but by chips in his upper arm that sense nerve activation.
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have already enabled people to send simple messages to each other over several thousand miles, by thought alone, using a helmet to detect brain waves, and another head-mounted device to create sensations of light flashes in brain tissue.
On current trends, biodigital brains will be a relatively normal part of life for over 25 million people by 2050, mainly to restore hearing or sight, as well as to overcome brain or spinal cord injuries, or, more rarely (for those who are wealthy and curious enough), to try to extend mental horizons, memory, intelligence, thinking speed and powers of concentration. One challenge to overcome is that chips planted directly into brain tissue can increase the risk of epilepsy, by irritating the brain.
Digital insights will become common but strange
How will such digital insights feel? Imagine walking down the street and just sensing, by instinct in a way very hard to describe, that the shop you need is further to the right, or having a ‘gut feeling’ that your heart rate has increased to around 80 beats a minute, or ‘just knowing’ that the person walking by is a relative of someone you know very well.
We will also see other strange inventions – for example, scientists have already created devices that allow genes inside the brain to be activated by the power of thought. Thinking activates a small light, which then activates light-sensitive pathways inside cells.
Most people feel very uncomfortable about chips being implanted into their brains, or the brains of their children. What about health risks or being hacked? Here is yet another example of how the future is not just about innovation, but also about emotion. You can have the smartest invention in the world, but if it fails to connect with passion, it is likely to fail as a successful product.
Worries about electromagnetic radiation
Expect growing concerns about the lifetime effect of low-dose exposure to electromagnetic radiation from overhead power lines, mobile phones, implanted chips and other devices. There have already been suggestions that there may be a weak link between cancer and intensive use of mobile phones. Some studies have suggested that tumours are slightly more common on the side of the head that a person usually uses for mobile phone calls.
Expect further evidence that mobile phone radiation affects brain function, as well as affecting the function of other cells. Expect legal action too, even though risks to an individual from normal use seem to be extremely low, and will become lower still, as phone calls become less popular, replaced by SMS, mobile web, and so on.
Ongoing boom of recorded video moments
I predicted years ago that personal video would be really important, but I was wrong about the speed of uptake of live video.
People love uploading recorded video – carefully checked, edited, selected – to match their personal image. YouTube users are uploading more than 100 hours of video every minute, and 1 billion different people use YouTube each month, watching an average of 6 hours each, of which 40% is already watched on mobile. At present 80% of traffic is outside the US, but YouTube reaches more American 18–25-year-olds than any cable TV network.
Why people still hate live video at work
Despite what I expected, live video links will I think continue to be relatively unpopular in most workplaces, compared to video calls between close family and friends. The reason is data leakage.
Just look at the number of people who have video cameras built into their phones, and ask how many times they are used for video calls. Or the number of people who would prefer a voice conference call to a video conference call at work.
Video calls reveal far more than you may realise at the time. Did you brush your hair before the call? Do you look like you have a hangover? For a home-worker – did you remember to shave? Can they see the washing up in the sink? Can they see the dog and one of your children wandering around? Can they see the laundry basket?
For family calls, such data leakage is enchanting and delightful – a feeling of being there, of actuality, a touch of authentic daily life – seeing the grandchildren wandering around or playing with a friend, being given a video tour of the garden, and noticing lots of things, capturing atmosphere, sharing experiences, treasured moments.
What is the future of the web?
The online world will influence even more of our daily activities over the next five decades, and most aspects of civilised life will be deeply linked to it, in one way or another.
Most people’s online worlds will be completely dominated over the next decade by no more than 10–20 global brands. Today those might be companies like Amazon, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Alibaba and LinkedIn. Their real value is brand recognition, and each will come under threat from next-generation competitors.
China will soon dominate the web
Mandarin has recently overtaken English as the most common first language spoken by web users, with over half a billion Mandarin speakers online. If you walk the streets of Beijing, Shanghai or Kunming, you will see the revolution yourself. Most younger people are deep into their smartphones, hurrying along or crossing the street. And the rest are clutching them tightly at all times.
