[LINK] IBM's annual predictions

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Behind I.B.M.’s Big Predictions

By QUENTIN HARDY| NYTimes.com December 19, 2011, 4:52 pm 

I.B.M. just issued its annual list of five predictions of developments in 
technology that it thinks will come true in the next five years. 

Like lots of predictive lists, particularly those that come around New 
Year’s, this is something of a pseudo-event that serves as an 
advertisement for the predictor’s own product or service. I.B.M.’s is no 
different in that regard, but it is worth looking at, both for the 
pedigree of who is doing the predicting, and what I.B.M.’s choices say 
about itself.

“To predict the next five years, you have to have a deep understanding of 
the last 50,” said Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at 
I.B.M., and a highly regarded researcher in advanced microprocessor 
design and computer systems who oversees the list’s creation.

And so here are the predictions:

– Small amounts of energy created by actions like people walking or water 
moving through pipes will be captured, stored in batteries  and used to 
power things like phones, cars or homes. “You’ll see new ecosystems of 
generation and capture,” Mr. Meyerson said. “You generate 60 to 65 watts 
while walking. You could easily use that to power a phone forever.”

– There will be no more passwords, as increasingly powerful phones and 
sensors will store your personal biometric information, enabling machines 
to automatically know you are who you say you are.

– Better sensors on and inside the human brain will allow for mental 
control of objects. Already there are experiments involving moving 
cursors by thinking, but his prediction is that technology will go 
further. “You will observe thought patterns, which are highly personal,” 
he said. “You can use this to better understand stroke, or disorders like 
autism.”

– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will 
belong to 80 percent of the world’s population. While this is nearly 
intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough 
will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which 
will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are 
illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads.

(A question is: What would this mean for world markets and politics when 
ordinary people can easily communicate with each other despite speaking 
different languages?)

– Much the way powerful mobile devices store your biometric information 
and translate your language, personalized information filters and search 
engines will bring you only the information you want. “This will invert 
the premise of marketing,” Mr. Meyerson said. The phones “will start to 
be your advocate, recognizing what is near and dear to you and getting 
it. Instead of companies speaking to you, you will reach out to 
companies.”

While I.B.M. is conducting research in all of these areas, it makes 
neither phones, games nor commercial batteries. Why, then, should it be 
predicting the advent of such magic-seeming devices for the commercial 
periphery?

The most likely reason is that I.B.M. makes the software and services for 
the core networks without which all these devices would not function, 
commercially. If Mr. Meyerson’s ideas play out, the phones and sensors 
will do their magic only by interaction with an Internet almost 
unimaginably more complex than the one we have today. Few companies in 
the world will be able to engineer and run it at a large scale, and 
I.B.M. would almost certainly be one.

“With devices like this at the edge of the network, at the core you will 
need to have machines that can manage 30,000 complex commands a second 
and yawn,” Mr. Meyerson said. “We’ve spent over $15 billion buying 
analytics companies in the last five to seven years. It is a huge 
investment that has given us deep, deep scientific and technical skills 
that go way beyond the businesses these companies were in.”

I.B.M. is said to have over 300 people working just on the advanced math 
needed to make this much complexity something like a well-integrated 
whole. If its predictions come true, I.B.M. may need many more people 
than that.
--

Cheers,
Stephen