Where the future is taking us

One of the best parts of my job is that I meet Australians from all walks of life - business people and politicians, public servants and students, city dwellers and farmers, migrant Australians and Indigenous Australians.

Interestingly, just about everyone wants to know the answer to the same two questions. How important is information communications research? And where is it taking us?

The importance of ICT is self-evident

They are easy because the importance of ICT is self-evident. Over the past decade we have seen a five-fold increase in the growth of electronic communications, with text messages increasing 30-fold, email traffic jumping by 200 percent, and a 20-fold increase in the amount of time we spend on the internet watching videos and retrieving information.

Electronic communications is to the letter everywhere. Powerful, easy-to-use, ubiquitous technologies – from smart phones and tablets to fixed and wireless networks to social networking and video sharing sites just as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – are rapidly changing the way we live, work and connect.

The difficulty comes in

That’s where the difficulty comes in. According to Moore’s Law, innovation improvements double every 18 months - if that holds true, within 20 years we will see 10,000-fold improvement in innovation performance. It’s hard to precisely say what technological improvement of that magnitude will mean for our workplaces and homes - however Telstra can see three mega-trends emerging.

The first mega-trend is networks. Fixed broadband won’t be replaced by wireless—mobile broadband will instead complement fixed broadband.

There are two reasons for this. High definition and 3D video and video conferencing will demand new high-speed, media-centric broadband networks that can only be delivered by fixed lines. And mobile networks are limited by wireless spectrum. Only about 3GHz of spectrum is useable for mobile broadband and much of this spectrum is already taken.

That being said, the ability of mobile networks to deliver higher broadband speeds will continue to grow. Coopers Law—the finding that improvements to the number of voice or data conversations that can be conducted over a given area of radio spectrum doubles every 2.5 years—has not changed since Marconi’s first transmissions in 1895. The second mega-trend is devices and interfaces. Smartphones will benefit dramatically from Moore’s Law, which will deliver increased performance and decreased costs. By the end of the decade, the big challenges facing smartphones—namely, battery life and screen size—will have been tackled and nearly all of the world’s population will have smartphones and access to the mobile Internet.

Global market for smartphones

Besides a global market for smartphones and the mobile internet, flat-screen technologies will continue to improve, with digital wallpaper able to turn every surface of a home or office into a HD screen. Future screen technologies – just as foldable, bendable and wearable displays – will recreate the large screen experience on the handset.

Voice recognition, gesture recognition and handwriting recognition will change the way we interact with our devices. By 2030, with a 10,000-fold improvement in computing power, there may even be thought recognition interfaces.

The third mega-trend relates to sensors

The third mega-trend relates to sensors and cloud computing. The ability to measure nearly anything using small, unobtrusive, low power sensors connected to radio networks means that just about everything will be connected all the time.

Not only that, fixed and mobile high-performance virtualised computing technologies and high-speed networks will enable us to have all our information stored and managed for us in the cloud.

The ubiquity of cloud computing will free individual users from the increasingly burdensome management of data. It will as well free users from securing the data, which will be done by cloud specialists.

It’s impossible to say specifically where these mega-trends will take individual industries. To remain competitive, although, connected governments and enterprises will need to constantly monitor and change the way they operate to keep up with an era of ongoing innovation disruptions. There will as well be a need for more fluid workplaces, greater collaboration, a demand for knowledge management and organisational change, and an possibility to create more individualised workplaces and tools.