Drones, Phones & More: What Tech Will Last A Century?
The first transcontinental phone call was made 100 years ago this week. What technology including the phone will make it another 100 years?
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We're marking the 100th anniversary of the first transcontinental phone call this week. If you missed our celebration of the call itself, please check out InformationWeek's picture gallery highlighting the call and the history of the phone, one of the most fundamental business tools in the enterprise.
That got us thinking. What other technologies will survive and adapt as well as the phone has? What technologies are coming to the end of their life cycles? We’re putting some major technologies to the test of surviving another hundred years.
The phone's survival and adaptation over 100 years from simple communication device to handheld computer is a tribute to the brilliance of the invention. It also indicates humanity's innate need to communicate, even across great distances, even if we’re reducing that communication to increasingly shorter text messages.
Before we get to those other technologies, can I simply point out the irony of the text message? Bell invented the telephone so we could hear each other's real voices instead of sending short, clipped messaged via telegram. For over 75 years, we have long intimate conversations on this device. Now we take the smartphone, the most powerful communication device ever invented, and turn it into a glorified telegraph machine sending shorter messages than Western Union. Seriously?
Is usage like that threatening the life of the phone? Are other changes in society making other technology obsolete? In the 1970s would you have believed that the phonograph, a contemporary invention to the phone, would have all but disappeared? Would you have believed you'd be telling your kids what a record was?
Not all technology survives. Sometimes there is a paradigm shift that wipes an invention from common use. Take gunpowder reducing the bow and sword to things you see at the Renaissance Faire. Some have survived for centuries like the wheel or paper.
A century is a long time in the lifetime of an invention. Just think. Since Bell made that call from New York to San Francisco, his phone went from something requiring living operators to connect people to rotary and touch-tone phones, to wireless and cellular, up to our current smartphones, which are personal computers in our pockets that take pictures and everything. Some technologies adapt. Others die.
So I thought I'd go through some of the most fundamental technology, old and new, in the enterprise today and see if I think it will last another 100 years. Seeing a couple years into the future is hard enough. Trying to see to 2115 is impossible. Remember it was only a little over 60 years between the Wright Brothers and landing a man on the moon. But heck, I'll give it a shot.
Check out the slideshow to see what I think survives and what doesn't. Then comment on what you think I got right and wrong.
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The oldest invention by far on the list, at roughly 2,000-years-old, you'd think it would be the one most vulnerable to extinction. But look around you. Despite the phones, tablets, TVs, and computers, you are surrounded by a lot of paper. Even if you don't read any paper magazines, books, or newspapers, you've still got receipts, junk mail, packaging, bags, catalogs, post-its, grocery lists, and countless other scraps floating around. Each one of them has an electronic or plastic equivalent. Why won't paper go away? My guess is that it finally will, slowly. With the exception of a few people who keep paper alive for nostalgia, it will be mostly out of our lives in about 50 years. But there's a chance it goes on. Paper is sustainable, recyclable, and easy to use. Do not underestimate it.
Verdict -- Gone.
People love their cars. No one is ditching his or her car, right? Even if they become self-driving, rolling living rooms, we're still going to have cars. Wrong. You know what we're going to have? Self-flying airplanes. Why congest the road with cars? There's much more space in three dimensions. The self-driving car is just step one. Once it can handle 55 miles per hour in two dimensions, it can handle 500 miles per hours in three. And that, my friends is the end of the car. We'll use our feet for close trips and we'll jet around for the rest.
Verdict -- Gone in 75 years.
I almost didn't include these items. But given how ubiquitous they are in the enterprise, it seemed like we had to have them. You know we aren't getting rid of them. Even if I divided this into "mainframe," "PC," "server," or any other form factor, we're going to have them, just better and faster. We're going to keep finding things to do with supercomputers (like running fleets of space ships) and PCs (like running the household electronics). Whether we move our smartphones into our brains or keep them in our hands, we're still going to want portable computing power.
Verdict -- Here forever. Even after people are gone.
Don't we all want this to die? Can't we all just agree to let it die? I'm pretty sure this will be around only so management can torture us.
Verdict -- Won't die even if you bury it with a stake in its heart.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time is running out on the clock. I haven't worn a watch in a decade. I have a phone to tell me the time. We use clocks as a society to help us agree that something will happen at a given time, like when to meet somewhere, or when to go to work. It isn't just the thing that tells us the time is being sucked into other things, it is that time itself is changing. Streaming TV on demand means we no longer have to know our favorite show comes on at 9. Working from home means we no longer need to know when to catch the bus. The clock and the way we use time tied to the clock are Industrial Age inventions. In the digital age, both will change.
Verdict -- We'll still measure time, but our relationship will be so different that the clock will be gone.
You probably don't think of it as technology, do you? But it is the one tool I think I can find in any business any time of the day, no matter what it does. Will a century change coffee? Climate change just might. Coffee crops are being threatened by a fungus brought on by on climate change. Growing conditions are changing as well. Want to know how bad it is? Starbucks bought a coffee farm to experiment with how to keep supplying coffee despite climate change.
Verdict -- Stock up on energy drinks.
What do you think will survive 100 years more? What technology do you think is destined to be totally gone or at least just a quaint hobby of ancient throwbacks? Share in the comments.
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