As part of the 2nd birthday celebrations of Intel’s IQ platform they have published a 2 part article interviewing 7 international futurists. I am one of them and I feel in pretty good company  as you can see by the list below. Due to space considerations my answers were edited down so I am putting up links to the articles here but also publishing my answers in their entirety:

Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel Corporation. His charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020.

Dan Abelow is an American inventor, author, speaker, and technology consultant. His latest patent-pending invention, the Expandiverse, is new technology to build an advanced Digital Earth today.

Daniel Burrus is a technology forecaster, the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, and the author of six books, including The New York Times bestseller ”Flash Foresight.”

Paul Higgins is an Australian futurist and keynote speaker with a Masters degree in Strategic Foresight; a guest lecturer at Victoria University (Melbourne Australia); a tech editor on Tumblr; a partner at Social Venture Partners International (Melbourne); and a very slow triathlete.

Whitney Johnson is a Managing Director at Springboard Fund, and co-founder of Clay Christensen’s investment firm.

Frank Rose is the author of “The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories” and a correspondent for Wired.

Vivek Wadhwa is a Fellow at Stanford University; Director of Research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering; and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University; and was listed as one of 2013′s 40 Most Influential Minds in Tech by TIME Magazine.

You can read the articles at:

The iQ Zeitgeist: Futurists Forecast the World of Tomorrow Part 1

The iQ Zeitgeist: Futurists Forecast the World of Tomorrow Part 2

 

My answers to the questions in full are below. For those of you who want to read more on some of these issues please refer to my ongoing series of major disruptors here on this blog :

1. Every piece of technology we own or online service we consume has Gordon Moore’s 1965 law as a common denominator (Moore’s Law = # of transistors doubling in microchips about every two years). Based on this, how do you think the tech landscape will change in 2 years, 4 years, and 8 years from now? Describe what a typical person’s day might be like at the office and at home.

[Paul Higgins]

Our view is that we have reached the point where with all this technology in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who are all capable of innovating both the hardware and the software platforms it is the height of arrogance to forecast what will happen. What I do know is that there will be enormous change and innovation based on the disruptive effect of these technologies.

2. Which technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on the humankind by 2025? 2050?

[Paul Higgins]

By 2025 I think that the most impactful technology beyond what we are seeing today likely to be driverless cars and while by 2050 artificial intelligence is likely to have the greatest impact. It is possible that large scale implementation of driverless cars can be done in many countries by that date although it is likely to be a little slower. Driverless cars have the capacity to create wholesale change across our communities with significant reductions in road trauma, requirements for hospital resources, and greatly reducing the capital investment needed in cars. The effects will go wider than this with significant impacts on the car manufacturing supply chain worldwide, elimination of the taxi industry, airport parking, and big changes in road and public transport infrastructure as well as urban planning.

The effects of significant levels  artificial intelligence are almost unimaginable. Combined with improvements in robotic technology they have the capacity to wipe out large swathes of current jobs and I am unsure whether the new jobs that are created will replace them. If this occurs we may see a fundamental restricting of the economy and a complete rethinking of people’s relationship to work. My fear is that this will be played out as a have and have not type of scenario and while here may be a strong chance of a rosy future that some science fiction paints the path to that future my be traumatic and tumultuous.

 

3. What technology / innovation that’s currently in development are you most excited about?

[Paul Higgins]

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence are the most exciting from my point of view, both in their capacity to enrich our lives but also from a risk point of view. The problems with artificial Intelligence capabilities have been a lot more stubborn than many people envisaged they would be and we commonly underestimate the capacity of our own brains which we should stand in constant awe of. However developments in both understanding of the brain, increases in computing power and the development of systems able to understand natural language and concepts are all driving us forward faster than in the past. Major projects such as The European and US Brain projects, and the development of technologies such as neuromorphic computer chips promise big leaps in our understanding and capacities over the next decade.

 

4. What will the role of tablets be in the future? How do you see personal computers evolving as they’ve gone from desktop, laptop, ultrabook, 2 in 1 and tablets?

 

[Paul Higgins] I think that we will naturally move towards wearable systems that will become more integrated into our lives. I cannot recall who said it but there is a line that I like that goes something like “it is when the technology disappears when it gets really interesting”. So in the not too distant future the use of smartphones and tablets will seem a little archaic. Wearable technology is at its early stages now and people are still fumbling around for a solution or combination of solutions that really work. However we tend to forget that tablets of different kinds were around for a long time before the iPad got such widespread adoption. Ongoing increases in computing power, changes in user interfaces, continuing miniaturisation and reduced energy requirements, plus rapid trialling of different systems and business models will move us a long way down this path in the next five years. The interfaces we deal with are likely to be even more intuitive than the ones that we have today and be a combination of wearable technology, cloud computing and projected interfaces that can be easily controlled through speech and motion.

 

5. Will humans ever decide to forgo real-life companions for virtual ones?

 

[Paul Higgins] Absolutely on several fronts. If we finally move to uploading our own consciousness (which I have significant doubts on) then virtual artificial companions are likely to be indistinguishable from “real” ones anyway. Before that in a world where we have had pet rocks, and people (including my 7 year old niece) have named their Roombas, and increasing people seem to be living alone I think that it is highly likely that semi-intelligent virtual companions are not far away.

 

6. What can we do today to prepare for technological advances of the future?

[Paul Higgins]

I always think of this in terms of a dog getting in a car and being driven along with the window open. They just accept the technology and embrace it and do not care about the technology as such, more about the experience. They just hang out the window with their tongue out and exude pure enjoyment. I think that the best thing that we can do is to embrace new technology and experiment with it continually. I do despair at times though that we are using these great technologies for trivial purposes and that some of the brightest brains in the world are focused on trivial applications because that is where the money is. We need to think a lot more deeply about the human and social applications of existing and new technologies because in the end that is all that really counts. I get depressed about technology when I read stuff like Michael Lewis’ latest book Flash Boys which describes about the use of technology to get a few milliseconds ahead of the market and cream off huge amounts of money without adding any value. At the same time I am enormously buoyed by the large numbers of people who I meet and work with who are totally engaged in making the world a better place. Last year I spoke at the Nexus Youth Philanthropy Summit in Australia and was blown away by the people in the room , mostly in their twenties, who were all doing fantastic things with technology and in particular social applications. It made me tired just to read their biographies but gave me enormous hope for the future.

 

7. Which prediction of yours didn’t come true (if any) that you were most disappointed about?

[Paul Higgins] In our work we actually eschew predictions as we believe that prediction does not work at any meaningful level of detail. Instead we work with people to envisage multiple futures and then to work with the uncertainty that is inherent in that approach and the real world. That has changed over time and we work a lot closer to the present than we used to. Having said that one of my big misses in picking up how things might we be used was the use of cameras on phones. I certainly did not consider how much they would be used and how important they would become in a personal and a political sense.

 

8. What films or books do you think best represent the future of technology? Will the world become The Jetsons soon?

[Paul Higgins] I am an avid reader of science fiction, both for enjoyment and for thinking about my own work. In that area I tend to read further in the future than our work is based. My favourite authors/books are:

 

Iain Banks and the Culture series. Sadly he passed away last year way before his time. The depiction of a society where work is no longer required and where idiosyncratic AIs run much of the systems, and structures is both highly entertaining and stimulating to think about.

 

Ramez Naam who wrote Nexus and Crux and who is on the short list for the Arthur C Clark award this year writes about nanotechnology and the possibilities of inserting it into our brains in order to both have more capacity, but also to commune with others. Couched in a political battle between idealists and governments seeking to control the technology it provides an interesting social perspective. I am also proud to have him as a Twitter follower.

 

Hannu Rajaniemi who wrote Quantum Thief and Fractal Prince and the upcoming Causal Angel writes really interesting fiction on the far future and harnessing of quantum physics. So dense that I have to go back and re-read the previous one to fully understand the next one.

 

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a favourite. It depicts a future world where there is conflict between the haves and the have nots where there has been environmental and technological disasters including climate change that are hinted at rather than described.

 

David Brin writes superbly on all sorts of areas of future technology and the dangers of ecological collapse, and is another Twitter follower I am proud to have,

 

And of course William Gibson, whose seminal book Neuromancer contributed significantly to my interest in science fiction and the field in general.

 

I would recommend that people read widely of these authors and others to think of all sorts of possible futures rather than nominating a particular book or film that best represents a future which is inherently unknowable