Once upon a time, portable calculators were thought to be futuristic contraptions that would never, ever find their way into the mainstream. But by the end of the 70s, every kid in school had one – and every kid in school has had one ever since. Yes, now there is absolutely no need to do any math in your head.
Next came mobile phones. Remember the days before those things, when to make a call you had to always ensure you had a quarter in your back pocket and hope that the phone in the phone booth across the street hadn’t been ripped out at the wall? Ah, yes, the glory days you may recall them as. But alas, those days have gone, for those things that we carry around in our pockets now can do pretty much anything except dry the dishes…
Or can they?
We think we’re living in a pretty technologically advanced time now, and it almost seems as if we, as a human race, couldn’t possibly advance any further.
But, then again, I’m sure the stone age cave men thought that too when they finally learned how to fashion axes out of sharp pieces of flint and sticks. Or during the industrial revolution when the steam engine was first invented. Or when calculators started turning up in the pencil cases of kids in schools across the whole world. Or when Google maps managed to map the streets across the whole globe.
Yes, technology is constantly advancing, and it will never ever stop until we’ve used all of the resources in the whole galaxy and beyond.
So, with this in mind, let’s consider how technology might change our lives in the future.
1. Driverless Cars
They’re here already of course. Being developed by a search engine company (Google
) of all things, amongst others. But yes, what’s happening now will one day surely lead to widespread adoption of driverless cars. No longer will we have to worry about passing our tests and getting our licenses, for we will all just be able to hop into our vehicles, which will arrive promptly at our front doors to pick us up, and we will be automatically chauffeured to wherever we tell the thing that we want to go.
Whole cities, I have no doubt, will embrace this type of transportation. The smart technology will mean that all vehicles communicate with one another, and there’ll be no speeding, no accidents, and no parking fines. This might be way, way in the future yet, but we’ll get there. We just will.
2. The IoT
Oh yes, this is the big one. This is the one that we really cannot escape from. The Internet of Things. It’s everywhere already. But it’s just about to explode off the scale. Gartner predicts that there will be 20 billion connected things by 2020. That’s less than 5 years away!!
But what will this mean? What will the IoT make possible that isn’t possible now?
Well, for instance, let’s take the security in our homes. Ok, most of us are sensible and have got a burglar alarm. But, the IoT will make sure that when we leave the house, the lights are all switched off for us, there are no malfunctions in any of our temperamental kitchen appliances (gas leaks, electrical faults that could case fires, etc.), that there are no poisonous gasses detected in the air, that there are no intruders anywhere in our property, that police alerts of any misdemeanours in the area are reported to all the connected devices promptly, that our doors and windows are all automatically locked, that our burglar alarms, sensors and CCTV cameras are all set and working, and that our car has been fired up already and the engine is nice and warm ready to go before we even buckle our seatbelts.
And it’s likely that all this will be controlled with our smartwatches or some other portable device. Ok, perhaps all this won’t be possible in every single home by 2020. But that’s the direction in which the IoT is taking us. Amazing.
3. Robots
Any Luddites out there are advised to stop reading this right now. Because, although I truly wish that I could tell you that proper, C-3PO-style androids were just around the corner, the fact is that they are realistically still decades away.
Of course they are – for what would be their purpose at the moment? Aside from, that is, automating certain factory processes that are currently being performed by humans…
And there it is. That is exactly what robots will be doing during the intervening years between now and their world domination sometime in the next century.
At the moment, factories are continuing to look for ways that smarter, safer robots can automate the completion of tasks in a much more efficient and controlled manner than what humans are currently capable of doing.
For robotics, as time goes on, it’s not so much ‘what we won’t have to do in the future as the technology advances’, it’s more of a case of ‘what manufacturers will disable us from doing as our practical skills are replaced by automated robots’.
Does the future of technology frighten or excite you? Let us know in the comments below.
John Waldron
John Waldron is a writer with markITwrite who regularly writes on lifestyle and technology. He has a First-Class Honours Degree in English with Creative Writing and an MA in Professional Writing from University College Falmouth, Cornwall.