Obsolete By 2030: Everything We Know About IT Today

The Importance

What will happen by the end of the next 15 year period is not as important now in terms of business needs and sense as is the journey ahead.

In the last 15 years we have seen technology progress faster than it has most probably in the preceding 150 years. The pace and rate of that progress has only been accelerating consistently through the last 15 year period.

The Acceleration Cycle

The currently ongoing acceleration of pace in IT's evolution is in part due to the successes of the IT professionals in enabling automation to the extent, that IT processes themselves that create jobs for IT professionals are fast becoming automated to displace the IT professionals. This is just an illustrative yardstick to help us appreciate how things are changing.

IT matters, because we no longer remember life, whether for work or play, without it. IT is very much a part of how we learn, communicate, interact and earn a living. While in part, its current pace of progress must be attributed to the success of a generation of IT Professionals at work today, that pace can also in part be attributed to generational change.

The Generational Change

The Millennials grew up through the transition from a world that depended on the old telecommunications through landlines, postal mail and books to a digitized world, in which access to information and each other has become a free for all. Through the transitory experience, the Millennials experienced simplification and increase of ease. Along with that, with access to information and exposure, the Millennials experienced both growth and liberation intellectually. This experience has brought about a growth in expectations and demands. Those expectations and demands have been driving the unprecedented rate of rapid change, or rather evolution, of technology that requires a constant and rapid evolution of IT as well. It is a cycle. And because the Millennials' appetite is yet uninstantiated, despite all that is already achieved or within reach such as the Internet of Everything, the rapid change is not just continuing, but still accelerating.

Even as the world is growing the grasp and grapple with the generational change that the emergence and rise of the Millennial Generation has been bringing about or is bringing about, on the horizon is the surfacing of the widest generational difference or gap possibly in human history; the gap between the Millennial Generation and the iGen.

While the Millennial Generation straddled the transition period into the chapter of digitisation, the iGen has come about, born, after the completion of that transition and commencement of the new chapter. The iGen has also straddled the transition from the Information Age to the Innovation Age. The Millennial Generation somewhat remembers the world without Personal Computers being common household items and mobile phone, while the iGen is acquainted with the world in which Smartphones were used by their parents to first introduce them to streaming online nursery rhymes. 

While the expectations of the Millennial Generation have been and will be higher than that of any generation's preceding, the expectations of iGen are and will be much higher, because of everything that has already been available to it from its very beginning. Life for the iGen has so far, through its early stage, been about things fast, immediate and instant. This has shaped the iGen to be short on patience and low on tolerance. The iGen will likely be the least tolerant in the human story yet towards redundancy of any kind in any sense. A drop in WiFi connection at home or even on a metro train, to the iGen, is "criminal". The iGen is also likely to be the least tolerant in the human story yet, towards lack of ease, tediousness or anything laborious in general. It is this impatience and intolerance that will require the escalation of technological evolution yet. The same impatience and intolerance is likely to serve as the driver for the iGen to want to change things, in fact transplant them, for they will never be enough for them.

We must remember that the iGen, from its beginning has grown up with the world ever rapidly changing around it. The iGen is used to change as such, that it will not be able to tolerate constance or stagnation.

With the Millennials acceptably being defined as those born between 1980 and 2000, the iGen should logically be taken to be the generation born from 2001 to now, with the oldest now being 14. While the Millennials started impacting the world early, with advents of things like Facebook and Airbnb or with teenagers building super-capacitors of human powered torches from their bedrooms, the iGen is expected to impact the world yet sooner given both the access and empowerment already in their hands.

The Next 15 Years

The youngest of the Millennials will be 30 by 2030 and the oldest of the iGen will be 29. The oldest Millennial will be 50. Together, these two generations will no longer be "new" but would have rather supplanted much of the working and commercial population. As consumers, they will define consumerism and consumer behaviour. They will have already taken full reigns of the innovation prerogative.

Inheriting economic turbulence that we have seen since the bursting of the dot com bubble, or rather the impacts, the two latest generations together will want to replace the "norms" of the world as they are for significant betterment. Like the preceding generations, the two latest generations will see improved technology as the answer. 

It is the perceived need for improvement that drives change. And when that perception is ongoing and constant, so too is change.

The internet is no longer about transmission of static information but live data and dynamic instruction to facilitated coordinated service to people by machines and software. Robots are increasingly becoming autonomous, with rapidly expanding roles and functions in any area one can imagine. Our interactions are going to be increasingly less about browsers and more about Smart Agents.

In effect the next 15 years will be an exciting journey of transiting from building a capacity to construct a transformed human experience to a stage of actually constructing that transformed human experience.

Eventually, human experience will be about thought leading to execution, with physical effort expended by machines, except where expenditure of effort by the human is intrinsically desired by the human, for itself. That is a massive change or transformation, from the present reality yet. What has happened till now, is that that massive change or transformation has become possible. The next 15 years are about that possibility becoming a reality, with the two generations capable of that change, making that change happen.

As fast as software or programming language is becoming redundant today with new types frequently emerging, the big changes over the next 15 years will likely see the end of every software or programming language known or employed today, just as nobody today uses FrontPage or PageMaker today.

In fact, with the advent of Smart Agents and Brain Computer Interface technologies, whole suites of long relied upon software will disappear. And whether or not dominant tech players of today support those advents, the two latest generations will ensure that those advents will replace our relationship with technology as it is today within the next decade, let alone the next decade and a half.

The Implications

Change is not easy. 15 years is a long time away. However, as mentioned earlier herein, at this point in time, it is the journey really that matters and because it will be one of rapid and constantly accelerating change, in something we need to use everyday, which is IT, it is going be a complicated experience, both at home and at work.

Switching and adapting to new processes, new interfaces and new methods of doing pretty much any type of work, will increasingly become a daily norm at the office within the next 15 years for professionals outside the function or field of IT itself.

For the IT professionals, the field is going to become increasingly less to do with developing and maintaining expertise, and more about keeping up with global churning and stirring of how programming and coding are done, until a stage is reached when a set of methodologies can finally with global concurrence within the profession stay for a significant or prolonged period. Even this journey of change must finally end somewhere at a destination, but which at this point and at least until 2030 is foreseeably unlikely. To put it simply, it is going to be a long period of upheaval and ambiguity, and anyone new entering the trade, profession or industry of IT, will have to be prepared for a rough ride, no differently than how new soldiers enter their profession in countries which are at all out war.

The ultimate end we can foresee as most likely, through the end of the generational change over the next decade and a half, is that IT as we know it, will no longer be in use, as is no longer in use the software known as PageMaker.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.