Predictions about Technology: Digital Retreading

October 7, 2015

I like it when a person tells me that software or a human can predict the future. My question is, “If the predictions are spot on, why is the owner of the prediction system talking? Why not play fantasy football, pick stocks, or hang out at Keeneland during an auction and buy horses whose value will skyrocket?

The answer is, “Err, well, hmmm.”

Exactly. Predicting the future is a bit like imagining oneself putting on soccer boots and filling in for the injured Lionel Messi. Easy to thing. Essentially impossible to do.

The fix is to be fuzzy. Instead of getting into a win-lose situation, there are caveats. I find these predictions and their predictors amusing. Not as enjoyable as the antics of something like IBM cognitive computing marketed by Bob Dylan or the silliness of Hewlett Packard management activities. But close, darned close.

I read “Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2016.” I noted this statement from the capitalist tool:

…the evolution of digital business is clearly at the heart of what is covered.

Okay, the trends are going to identify trends which will allow an MBA or a savvy marketer to look at business and understand how “business” will evolve. Darwin to the future, not Darwin from the past I assume.

The question in my mind is, “Are these retread ideas?”

Here are three “trends” which caught my attention. To get the full intellectual payload, you will need to read the article or, better yet, seek out a Gartner wizard and get the trend thing straight from the horse’s mouth. Yep, right, mouth.

Trend 2: Ambient user experience.

I remember hearing about ambient computing years ago. The idea was that one could walk around and compute. I also ran across Deloitte’s identification of a similar trend months ago. But it was in the late 1990s or early 2000s when an MIT person talked about the concept. Obviously if one is computing whilst walking around, there is an experience involved. With mobile devices outselling tethered devices, it seems disingenuous to talk about this trend. According to Forbes, the capitalist tool:

Gartner posits that the devices and sensors will become so smart that they will be able to organize our lives without our even noticing that they are doing so.

I like posit. The word means “to dispose or set firmly, assume or affirm the existence of, and propose as an explanation.” Yep, posit something that academics and blue chip consulting firms have been saying for a while.

Trend 4: Information of Everything

Now these universal statements are rhetorical tactics which make my tail feathers stand up. “Everything” is a broad concept. A critical reader may want to ask, “Will you provide me with information about line 24 million in Watson’s 100 million lines of code?” The “everything” is going to provide this answer. Nope. Logical flaw. But here’s how the capitalist tool, a font of logical thought, presents this “information of everything” trend:

According to Gartner, by 2020, 25 billion devices will be generating data about almost every topic imaginable. This is equal parts opportunity and challenge.  There will be a plethora of data, but making sense of it will be the trick. Those companies that harness the power of this tidal wave of information will leapfrog competitors in the process.

I like the plethora. I like the leapfrog. I like the tidal wave. I have a sneaking suspicion that most folks with a computer device have experienced a moment of information confusion. “With every topic imaginable”, confusion is a familiar neighbor. Now how long has this concept of lots of information from lots of devices with communications capability been around? Forbes, the capitalist tool, published in June 2014 “A Very Short History of the Internet of Things.” If the Forbes’ writer had taken the time to look at that article, the concept poked its nose into the world in the early 1930s. Well, that is only 80 years ago. But it is a trend. Hmm. Trend.

Now my favorite.

Trend 9. Mesh App and Service Architecture

The notion that computer systems able to exchange information is a good one. I can’t recall when I learned about this concept. Wait. No, I remember. It was in 1963 when I took my first class in computer programming. The professor, a fine autistic polymath, explained that the mainframe—a 1710—was a collection of components. He said in 1962 that different machines would talk to one another in the future. Well, there you go. A third rate university with dullards like me in class got a prognostication which seems to be true. That was more than half a century ago. Here’s the modern version of this old chestnut:

More apps are being built to be plugged together, and the value of the combination is much greater than the sum of the parts.  As Lyft has integrated with comparable offerings in other countries, its ability to expand its offering for traditional customers traveling abroad and the reverse has meant faster growth with minimal cost implications.

Enough of these walks down memory lane. Three observations:

  1. These trends are recycled concepts
  2. The presentation of the trends is a marketing play, nothing more, nothing less
  3. Mid tier consulting firms are trying really hard to sound very authoritative, important, and substantial.

That would work if footnotes provides pointers to those who offered the ideas before. Whether a blue chip consulting firm like Deloitte or a half wild computer science professor in the Midwest, the trends are not trends.

We are, gentle reader, looking at digital retreaded tires. A recap. A remold. Old stuff made fresh. Just don’t drive too quickly into the future on these babies. Want to bet on this?

Stephen E Arnold, October 7, 2015

Comments

Comments are closed.

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta