By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com
MADISON – By the year 2050, there will be 1 million electronic sensors for every person on earth – collecting data for reasons we now can’t possibly conceive.
And while 2050 is a long ways off, how we live and how the world does business will change many times because of advances in technology.
Those were just a few of the predictions made in a Wednesday luncheon talk by Jeff Wacker, “futurist” for EDS, the Texas-based global IT services company. He spoke at the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium, which runs through Thursday and is aimed at linking financial backers with young companies.
Wacker said changes often come subtely, building like a storm.
“First there is a change in the wind, a little rain and then, boom, it’s here,” he said.
In some cases, Wacker said the future of IT has already arrived.
He said some companies are using predictive and simulation technologies to run their operations and shorten response time.
Wacker said McDonald’s is installing cameras and its drive-through lanes to look at the kind of cars, count heads and use that information to tell cooks what to make before people place their orders. That technology, he said, is reducing food waste significantly.
Wacker also said cell phones were rapidly evolving into “mobile everything” devices that will be able monitor our health, buy tickets and do scores of other functions.
“They are ‘edge’ devices,” he said, noting that he had recently come up with a list of 101 things the mobile everything could do.
With all the information gathering and storage that is going on now, Wacker said privacy will continue to be a subject of controversy.
He said 15 percent of the population couldn’t care less, another 15 percent want absolute privacy and it’s “negotiable” with the other 70 percent. Many privacy concerns, he said, are situational and the key will be to allow individuals to control who has access to their personal information.
Wacker said the amount of change that happened during the 1980s is now being compressed into three years. That means for companies to thrive, they must build for change and be able to swap out pieces of their systems rapidly rather than doing entire overhauls, which he compared to heart surgery.
But the futurist warned that too much change, or “hrair,” will overload people who will then turn off to the technology. Complexity will be the limiting factor, he said.
“You must respect people or they will reject you,” he said. “You can’t eliminate complexity, but you can manage it.”
Wacker also said technology will speed automation, and help society deal with the upcoming shortage of workers causes by retiring baby boomers.
But technology, as it has done many times in the past, will make some workers’ jobs obsolete.
“But I think most people will adapt,” he said. “They have in the past.”
