The Future of Communications – Part I – The Question
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )
The future of communications is not driven by what is technically possible based on past activity but rather by a radical approach to revolutionizing the user experience for the future.
Communications at its core is about interaction, knowledge transfer, sharing, collaborating, and linking groups, thoughts and skills. If we seek the future of communications, we should start by asking what an alternate and better, but so far unachievable, user experience should be. If your consider the Star Trek series and the technology displayed there, the details of how it worked were not what enthralled us, it was rather the way the technology enhanced the capabilities of the human beings using it. Warp Drive was about being able to take us farther than ever possible. The medical devices and scanners were about people being able to diagnose with certainty an illness or condition. Phasers where about being able to protect oneself in a way that allowed you to select the outcome (kill, stun…). And Communicators were about being able to invoke complex communications between people without technical intrusiveness (notice they never dialed a phone number or looked up a directory entry before they talked).
All of these technologies were intuitive to the audience because they represented a better way to experience the world, accomplish a goal or exist as a human being. Yet every one of them was equivalent to magic as the technical capability to do them still to this day eludes us.
When you see that vision of a better way to exist, depending on your view, you either dismiss it as a fantasy or decide that if you can dream it and it makes sense, you would try to make it happen. When I think about the future of communications, or any space for that matter, I always try to consider what about the user experience is missing and how we might improve or transform the task the technology is focused on rather than just try to find a role for a new technology without context. In essence, to answer the question “What is the Future of Communications?” we must start with a view of what the communications experience should look like regardless of our bias and insight of existing technical capabilities.
“What is the Future of Communications?” … continued in part II