Ten Year Futures

Benedict Evans

Interesting ideas on how to think about the future seem to come in clumps. So alongside Ben Hammersley’s reflections, it’s well worth watching and listening to this presentation of a ten year view of emerging technologies and their implications. The approaches of the two talks are very different, but interestingly, they share the simple but powerful technique of looking backwards as a good way of understanding what we might be seeing when we look forwards.

They also both talk about the multiplier effect of innovation: the power of steam engines is not that they replace one horse, it is that each one replaces many horses, and in doing so makes it possible do things which would be impossible for any number of horses. In the same way, machine learning is a substitute for human learning, but operating at a scale and pace which any number of humans could not imitate.

This one is particularly good at distinguishing between the maturity of the technology and the maturity of the use and impact of the technology. Machine learning, and especially the way it allows computers to ‘see’ as well as to ‘learn’ and ‘count’, is well along a technology development S-curve, but at a much earlier point of the very different technology deployment S-curve, and the same broad pattern applies to other emerging technologies.

 

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