I’ve been asked to deliver an opening keynote at an upcoming conference. In this talk, I’ve been asked to survey future technologies and how they might shape communication service providers landscape. To prepare, I started jotting down a list of all the interesting future technologies and it immediately occurred to me that many of these are already here with us today. This reminded me of the quote by William Gibson – “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.

And indeed, the difference between today and the future is often merely the pervasiveness of these technologies. In most cases, the technologies exist and their potential can be anticipated to a large extent, if considered carefully.

But then I wondered whether I missed something or got my estimates wrong.

It’s much easier to see the direction of a trend than to know when it will be realized. For example, we all know that at some point in the future, cars will drive themselves. The question isn’t whether or not this will happen. The question is only “when?” this will be a reality. Similarly, we can now all see that at some point in the future, people will barely use paper books. These will become a thing of the past. The really interesting question is “when?” will this future be reality. Certainly in less than 100 years, perhaps less than 20, and perhaps even less than 10 years from now.

Why is this critical?

Well, innovators must get their timing right – bringing a solution to market too early can be as devastating to a venture as bringing it too late.

So I was thinking, perhaps inspired by my crowdfunding blog post, that you might help me figure out if I got it right. I’m going to put forth my initial estimate of when and why I believe a set of technologies will become mature and pervasive (not ubiquitous). When I say “pervasive”, I mean when will the technology be widely used – perhaps as much as 25% of the potential users will already be using it. At that point in time, it would probably not yet completely take over its predecessor technology.

Then, I’d like you to help me. Please point out any important technologies I have missed (note that I intentionally dropped over 40 items from this list, as otherwise this would have become a very long list) and also comment on the time you think they would become pervasive and why.

So here we go: the technologies, when they will mature, and why:

Is this our future?

Some observations

If all this is true (and it certainly isn’t), there are some rather funny consequences. For example, this would imply that in 15 years we will have cured cancer and have self-driving vehicles, yet our home would not yet be fully automated. Also, if much of this plays itself out as suggested, the next two decades are going to be extremely exciting, don’t you think?

I’m the first to admit that this table certainly has many errors and omissions. In fact, this is not a set of concrete predictions so much as it is a straw man for you all to tear up and suggest corrections.

Call to action

Please, help identify notable omissions and correct these estimates, and perhaps our collective wisdom will provide better insight into our future.