Call Me When Technology Bestows Eternal Life

A downside of working in tech is that after awhile you feel like you’ve seen and heard it all. Hardly a day goes by without someone predicting a marvel others foresaw eons ago. You know you’re jaded when a pundit envisions the future and you respond, “Um, aren’t we doing that stuff already?”

I had this experience just today. I was reading The Rise of Generation C , an article by the folks at Booz Company, in the Spring issue of Strategy + Business. It started off well, building a scenario around a 20-year-old computer science student named “Colin” living in London in the year 2020. Then the authors began elaborating on the tech innovations revolutionizing the lives of Colin & Co. a decade hence, like:

• Primary Digital Devices (PDDs) that keep them connected 24 hours/day to pals, family, plus favorite tunes, games, video
• Home Wi-Fi networks with access to “superfast download speeds of up to 100 Mbps”
• PDD multi-casting: simultaneous voice, data, video, texting
• Preference for texting over voice
• PDD for distance education (and when Colin gets a job) virtual workplace at home
• Remote and/or in-store mobile wallet to find products, read reviews and make purchases
• A shift away from traditional telecom providers and toward Google, Apple, Facebook and smaller players

Booz & Company call the folk doing all this cool stuff, “Generation C — connected, communicating, content-centric, computerized, community-oriented, always clicking.”  Only one problem. They’re really Generation BTDT — Been There, Done That. These supposedly far future apps and behaviors are fast becoming routine in 2011.

And guess what? People were talking about them at least two – three decades ago. Recently I went online and dug up a speech by Bill McGowan dating from 1982. Largely forgotten now, McGowan founded a company called MCI which is responsible for introducing the idea that competition in communications is a desirable thing. But never mind that. What struck me was Bill’s description of the future, “a time when people will wear Dick Tracy wrist-phones to communicate anywhere and any time.” Sounds like a 1980s version of 2020′s PDD. However he did it, McGowan really looked ahead.

We see his like today in people such as Peter Thiel, who comes up with and supports “out there” predictions like seasteading, independent ocean-going libertarian colonies, and the end of aging. The wilder and more unlikely such things may seem at present, the better, and perhaps — given the way tech tends to fool and surprise us — the more likely they’ll actually come to pass.