Expert interview with Ray Hammond
Europe’s leading futurologist
Part 1
Posted on November 20, 2007 - Filed Under CSA - Celebrity Speakers, Expert Interviews |
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1. As Europe’s most experienced futurologist, what do you think about today’s huge commercial potential of the internet and its impacts on tomorrow’s global businesses?
The internet is going to merge with television, radio, cellular networks and wireless technologies to create one global super-medium (for which we do not yet have a name) in which a very large part of business will be conducted. Many businesses will be wholly virtual while many physical businesses (e.g. construction and aviation) will use the new enlarged, multi-media, multi-sensory, always on, always connected, everything to everything, everyone to everyone ”medium” to improve their business processes, their financial trading patterns, their logistics and their customer orientation.
2. How much Information Technology could affect business environment in the next, let’s say, ten years and what other inventions do you stipulate will come into sight by then (now that we already have the multifunctional iPhone)?
The “mobile phone” is a misnomer – we do not yet have the language to describe what the device formerly known as the mobile phone is becoming. In the very near future real-time natural language interfaces will start to transform the device into an intelligence personal assistant. Within ten years ’software personalities’ which reside within the devices will become our personal assistants, organizing our electronic information, our digital money and our business and social lives.
3. Will constant evolution of sophisticated technology increase people’s quality of life regarding their work? Could technology create more jobs or, on the contrary, could it erase many of them?
Technology neither creates nor destroys jobs, but it sometimes redistributes them. Whilst the internet may allow a company to offshore its call centre operations to India or China, the additional wealth generated in the home economy by such off shoring enables companies to expand and create entirely new forms of jobs within the home economy. In general, the aggressive adoption of new technology sometimes creates short-term pain within an economy as old-style jobs disappear but the benefits of adopting new technology usually bring such economic advantages so that almost everyone does better in the medium and long term
4. What is your greatest fear concerning technology progress and future businesses?
My greatest fear is that while 80 per cent of the world is developing rapidly through the dual forces of information technology and globalization, the one billion poorest people in the world (who live in 58 nation states, most, but not all, in sub-Saharan Africa) are allowed to languish in zero growth poverty economies. If special help (not just aid) is not extended to these people they will become the global terrorists of the middle 21st Century, wreaking their revenge for their poverty on the developed and developing world.
end of part 1 of this interview
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