My thoughts on technology prediction

Today I was checking my WhatsApp messages and I found, between tens of messages that I received this morning, an interesting one. It raised questions about technology anticipation and predictions. The message is a photo taken from an old newspaper article titled: “You’ll be able to carry phone in pocket in future”. For us today, this is taken as a basic granted reality. All of us are carrying a mobile phone in our pockets for the past 20 years, and for many two mobiles or even three at the same time. However, what do you think when I will tell you that this article was published in 1963, I was amazed myself.

I remember when my father acquired a new mobile phone in the 1980s, it was not handheld, not fitting in his pocket yet. It was a huge device, about the size of a carrying laptop bag, but much heavier. It has a strap, and he used to carry it over his shoulder. The handheld was not wireless, it was connected to the main device with a telephone cord.  It was great, we could reach him even if he is away from home.  This brings another childhood memory in the late 1980s in Abu Dhabi. I was with my father, and he was driving in Abu Dhabi Corniche. On the side, a vehicle stopped in parallel to the road and the driver was talking over the phone. The driver was H.H. Sheikh Zayed, the late president of the UAE.  He looked happy, smiling while talking over the phone.

Going back to mobile history, the first mobile prototype was manufactured by Motorola in 1973. It was a 2 kg device. Cannot be carried in pockets yet. Someone might argue if the article were published in 1963 and the first phone introduced in 1973, that means that the article predicts the mobile phone 10 years ahead because the scientific community could be talking about it since the 1960s. But what if I told you that someone predicted smartphones not only mobiles 95 years ago. “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket”. This was quoted by Nikola Tesla in a magazine interview in 1926.

How far human can predict accurately the technological breakthrough? Do all technology predictions have scientific bases? Searching this topic, you will find thousands of articles filled with future predictions of how the technology will be in the next 5, 10 years, or beyond. Not only that, but you will also find that our pop culture, movies, and TV series also trying to predict the future.   Back to the Future movies and Star Trek predicted several of today’s technologies many years ahead. Technology prediction in cinema and TV is another topic that I want to write about soon.

In my search, I found that researchers and scientists are giving predictions for the next 10 years and further. The articles that I read have no mention of the way they anticipated the technologies or what scientific mechanisms they used to draw their predictions. Moreover, all the predictions are based mainly on the expansion or enhancement of today’s technologies. For example, the next generation of autonomous vehicles or the expansion of using AI in healthcare and other fields. From my search, the following technologies will continue to evolve in the next 10 years: blockchain, quantum computing, 5G and perhaps 6G, robotics, and AI. I wish to see more local approaches to technology prediction, at least for the coming 5 years with more analysis on the impact on us.

Tesla anticipated smartphones 85 years before the first iPhone, and many other scientists today are trying to predict the next big thing. However, I cannot see any scientific methodology of how the conclusions were drawn and no impact of the technologies mentioned.  Let us start to think with an open mind and anticipate the future… Draw me a line and tell me what you think.