Monday, September 11, 2000		Article

‘Houses will change colour with sunshine in the 21st century’
By R. Suryamurthy

The pace of technological development continues to accelerate. With the blistering pace of change caused by e-business, the following inevitable questions arise:

Who is in charge? Who sets the rules? Who provides the governance? And who owns what? While many such questions still have yet to be answered, what certainly isn't in doubt is that "technology will play an increasingly important role in our 21st century life-sustaining it on the one hand, complicating it on the other; disturbing all our social paradigms, and driving us inevitably forward," says Robert Bishop, Chairman and CEO, SGI, while speaking about the future of technology during his visit to New Delhi.

Outlining the technological road map for the first couple of decades of the 21st century, Robert Bishop, says initially, the Moore's Law for semiconductors will last another 20 years, after which devices would be built at the atomic level.

(Moore's Law states that semiconductors deliver double the performance at half the price every two years. Put another way, this means a four-fold improvement in price/performance after every two years; a thousand-fold improvement every 10 years; and million-fold improvement every 20 years.)

So what will this do for us 20 years hence? Zero-cost computing and telecommunications will result in a world bathed in information. One planet. One network. The "Infosphere"!

Secondly, as a consequence of this, most services, including government, health, education, entertainment, and commerce, will go online and digital, as will most content such as books, films, music, and video. Bishop says: "We can expect most historical content will be converted into this new digital format."

Radio, TV, phone, fax, and the PC will probably converge into a single digital device. Printing, publishing, cinema, and photography will converge into a single, integrated industry. He says it is also likely that all will have a single ID number that will allow roaming around the world and receiving a single itemised monthly statement listing all charges for content and services that have been accessed along the way. While many persons may not like this newly emerging digital world—the world of teleworkers, teleconsumers, and tele-voters—the trends are there for all to see.

Third, intelligent software will do most of the work for us. Modular, componentised, and object-oriented; user-oriented, tolerant, and idiot-proof; voice-driven, visually intensive, personal, and friendly software will give technology a human face.

Finally, a vast array of consumer-oriented, Internet-based, digital products will emerge, incorporating digital cameras, local wireless links, the GSM, and the GPS.

"Countless digital chips will be in every house, automobile, and appliance, and in clothing too - flexible, washable and even dryable," he remarks.

"We also have deregulation, which is powering competition both locally and globally, and venture capital fuelling young start-up technology companies.

On top of all this, technology is generally multiplicative, not simply additive — creating an exponential effect as each new technology spawns other new technologies and resulting in higher-level effects," he adds.

The product design process is now both digital and paperless, a new virtual process encompassing digital prototyping, testing, and simulation; customised manufacturing; build-to-order; and a zero-inventory business model.

The Internet business model, meanwhile, is all about chat rooms, bulletin boards, and Web sites; hit-rates, eyeballs, and click-throughs; portals, ISPs, ASPs, auction sites, and banner ads; and the enormous market valuations of ".com" companies.

New e-marketing methods pitch transnational versus national marketing; one-on-one versus mass marketing; direct versus indirect marketing; and the removal of the need for traditional middlemen and their replacement by the new infomediaries.

In each of these, content is the king, resulting in a whole new generation of media and digital intellectual property (digital IP) entrepreneurs. As bandwidth is being upgraded from narrow to broadband, content will be upgraded from text through audio to video streaming.

"As a natural consequence of these developments," he says, "digital IP will take centre stage as the main "currency" of the 21st century." Already, intellectual property accounts for 20 per cent of the world trade (amounting to $ 740 billion)—a figure that's likely to increase to 50 per cent by the middle of the 21st century.

What about the other major changes that we can expect as we navigate the early days of this new millennium? First, materials science will explode—leveraged by IT. "Smart" materials are on the way that can sense their own state and respond. "These include materials that can sense fatigue and erosion; others that can sense temperature, pressure, and sunlight; and yet more that can mimic nature with self-healing and adaptive, biological-type responses," he says.

Such materials will ultimately contain both structural and computing elements: rigid rectilinear designs will become fluid and dynamic when in motion; car tyres will change shape as they round corners; and houses will change colour with sunshine, flex with the wind, and perhaps even rotate like a sunflower. "We will have created an intelligent landscape."

"Second, smart materials and IT will ultimately be applied to the human body itself, with major implications for cosmetic surgery, cavity-free teeth, and computer-designed prostheses; the elimination of physical handicaps; organ replacements; and the entire aging process," Bishop says.

Third, genetic engineering may well become the most visible of technologies in the 21st century. Already, genetically modified (GM) foods are with us and are causing a tremendous uproar around the world, as witnessed by recent antitrust actions in 30 countries. We also have significant cloning capabilities (as demonstrated by Dolly the sheep). He says, "We will soon have a complete map of the human genome, including all 3 billion base pairs. And gene therapy is very likely to follow, curing thousands of known diseases (although the politics of who gets access to gene therapy will be hotly contested).