Technology timeline

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Introduction

The future looks ever more exciting each year. Technology development is
 still accelerating and an increasing number of new fields are being created
and exploding new ideas onto the market.

The future is a hard to predict but here at BTexact we have always believed
 that inventing the future is the best way to create it. One thing is
certain in the distant future - the world will be a very different place.
One tool we produce to help alleviate uncertainty about the future is our
BTexact technology timeline. Paul McIlroy produced the first timeline in
1991 and it has been updated about once every two or three years. This is
the 5th edition, and the biggest yet. A new editor Ian Neild has joined me
on this edition and brought a welcome freshness to the timeline.

The timeline is produced mainly to give BT researchers and managers a view
of what the operating environment is likely to contain at any future date,
so that our products and services can be better targeted to the needs of the
customer. But we have also found that many people outside the company find
it useful too, so we always try to make it as free of technical jargon as
possible. What must be remembered by anyone preparing for the future is that
technology change isn't very important in itself.What matters is what this
change enables or destroys.

Timeline targets include our business customers, government, media and many
private individuals. Extracts of previous versions have appeared in numerous
books.

Several sources of information are used for the timeline. The largest single
source is the previous edition, where most of the entries are still in the
future and still valid.We have only had to change a few of the dates, which
we hope is an indication that we were guessing well. Many items from our
last edition have happened on cue, and have therefore been removed, but many
more new developments have come into view that weren't so obvious last time
round.We obtain these new entries from industry journals and bulletins,
scouring the Internet, chatting to experts, and some just by relaxing and
thinking about the future. The arguments that the timeline has produced in
the past have often proved to be useful to us and we hope that this will
have the same affect on you.

Experience has shown us that telecomms and computing industry companies see
the future in quite different terms, so this time we are grateful to Jeff
Harrow, formerly of Compaq, whose newsletters have provide us with a view
from the computing industry and a number of the new entries.

We have also modified and extended the 'wildcard' section, based on John
Petersen's excellent work in his book 'Out of the Blue'. Although wildcards
are defined as events that can happen at almost any time, for most there is
a date before which they couldn't happen, since their mechanisms do not yet
exist.We have estimated the dates at which each wildcard becomes feasible.We
have also changed the focus of this to illustrate the acceleration of the
downside of the technology development. Each new technology brings many
benefits but also has a price. It is clear from this section that we are
rapidly inventing new ways of destroying ourselves, and that the risk to
mankind is increasing exponentially. Of course, the far future is much
harder to imagine than the near future, so the number of dangerous
 technologies listed actually drops off in our list after a couple of
decades, but we could reasonably assume that by the time we get there, we
will be able to see many more potential dangers. Such a trend is cause for
concern. Even though the problems are mostly soluble by even more advanced
technologies, there will generally be a time lag between a problem arising
and a solution being implemented, so the overall risk still increases with
time. Technology timeline

However, the intention of the timeline as always is to illustrate the
 potential lying ahead for beneficial technologies. Not all will be
successful in the marketplace. Some won't ever be implemented at all, but as
the rest come on stream, our lives will improve in many ways.We will have
more variety of entertainment, better health, greater wealth, and probably
better social wellbeing. We will have more time saving devices and
ultrasmart computers will do most of our admin, but the future world will
offer so much more opportunity to be productively and socially busy that we
will have even less free time than today! If we think of this as living life
to the full rather than in terms of stress, then the future looks good.

We hope you enjoy reading our timeline as much as we enjoyed producing it.

Ian Pearson Ian Neild
email: ian.d.pearson@bt.com email: ian.neild@bt.com

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