The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient intelligence in 2010". It's a brilliant look at what the future might have been. Let's go through some of the scenarios and see how close 2026 is to 2000's vision of 2010.

Scenario 1: ‘Maria’ – Road Warrior (close-term future)

Our titular heroine steps off a long haul flight into a foreign country.

she knows that she can travel much lighter than less than a decade ago, when she had to carry a collection of different so-called personal computing devices (laptop PC, mobile phone, electronic organisers and sometimes beamers and printers). Her computing system for this trip is reduced to one highly personalised communications device, her ‘P–Com’ that she wears on her wrist.

Well… OK! Not a bad start. You probably wouldn't want everything controlled by your smart watch - but the mobile is a good substitute. Although wireless video casting works, you'd probably want a trusty USB-C just to make sure.

she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.

We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.

Maria heads to her rented car:

The car opens as she approaches. It starts at the press of a button: she doesn’t need a key. She still has to drive the car but she is supported in her journey downtown to the conference centre-hotel by the traffic guidance system that had been launched by the city government as part of the ‘AmI-Nation’ initiative two years earlier.

Lots of cars now have wireless entry and are button controlled. Rental cars often have mobile app unlocking.

The traffic guidance is not provided by local governments. A mixture of international satellites provide positioning information, and a bunch of private companies provide traffic guidance.

Downtown traffic has been a legendary nightmare in this city for many years, and draconian steps were taken to limit access to the city centre. But Maria has priority access rights into the central cordon because she has a reservation in the car park of the hotel. Central access however comes at a premium price, in Maria’s case it is embedded in a deal negotiated between her personal agent and the transaction agents of the car-rental and hotel chains

Ah! The dream of personal agents. Not even close.

In the car Maria’s teenage daughter comes through on the audio system. Amanda has detected from ‘En Casa’ system at home that her mother is in a place that supports direct voice contact.

Hurrah for Bluetooth! Every car supports that now. Presence and location sensing is also common. Although the idea of a teenager willingly making a voice call is, sadly, a fantasy.

Her room adopts her ‘personality’ as she enters. The room temperature, default lighting and a range of video and music choices are displayed on the video wall.

Pffft! Nope. But do people really want this? The music and video are stored on her phone, so there's no need to transmit private data to a hotel.

Using voice commands she adjusts the light levels and commands a bath. Then she calls up her daughter on the video wall, while talking she uses a traditional remote control system to browse through a set of webcast local news bulletins from back home that her daughter tells her about. They watch them together.

Do you want an always-on Alexa in your hotel room? We have the technology, but we seem to shun in outside of specific scenarios.

We still have traditional remotes for browsing, and how lovely that they predicted the rise of simultaneous viewing!

Later on she ‘localises’ her presentation with the help of an agent that is specialised in advising on local preferences (colour schemes, the use of language).

I'd say we're there with a mixture of templates and LLMs. Translation and localisation is good enough.

She stores the presentation on the secure server at headquarters back in Europe. In the hotel’s seminar room where the sales pitch is take place, she will be able to call down an encrypted version of the presentation and give it a post presentation decrypt life of 1.5 minutes

Yup! Most things live in the cloud. Access controls are a thing. Whether people can be bothered to use them is another matter!

As she enters the meeting she raises communications access thresholds to block out anything but red-level ‘emergency’ messages

Do-Not-Disturb is a feature on every modern phone.

Coming out of the meeting she lowers the communication barriers again and picks up a number of amber level communications including one from her cardio-monitor warning her to take some rest now.

Ah! The constant chastising FitBit!

Scenario 2: ‘Dimitrios’ and the Digital Me’ (D-Me) (near-term future)

Dimitrios is the sort of self-facilitating media node you would never get tired of slapping.

Dimitrios is wearing, embedded in his clothes (or in his own body), a voice activated ‘gateway’ or digital avatar of himself, familiarly known as ‘D-Me’ or ‘Digital Me’. […] He feels quite confident with his D-Me and relies upon its ‘intelligent‘ reactions.

Nope! Oh, sure, your phone can auto-suggest some stock phrases to reply to emails. But we are nowhere close to having a physically embedded system which learns from us and can be trusted to respond.

Dimitrios receives calls which are:

answered formally but smoothly in corresponding languages by Dimitrios’ D-Me with a nice reproduction of Dimitrios’ voice and typical accent,

Vocal cloning is here. It is almost out of the uncanny valley. But I think most people would prefer to send a quick text or voice-note rather than use an AI.

a call from his wife is further analysed by his D-Me. In a first attempt, Dimitrios’ ‘avatar-like’ voice runs a brief conversation with his wife, with the intention of negotiating a delay while explaining his current environment.

She's going to leave him.

Dimitrios’ D-Me has caught a message from an older person’s D-Me, located in the nearby metro station. This senior has left his home without his medicine and would feel at ease knowing where and how to access similar drugs in an easy way. He has addressed his query in natural speech to his D-Me.

This is weird. Yes, we have smart-agents which are just about good enough to recognise speech and understand it. Why is it being sent to Dimitrios?

Dimitrios happens to suffer from similar heart problems and uses the same drugs. Dimitrios’ D-Me processes the available data as to offer information to the senior. It ‘decides’ neither to reveal Dimitrios’ identity (privacy level), nor to offer Dimitrios’ direct help (lack of availability), but to list the closest drug shops, the alternative drugs, offer a potential contact with the self-help group. This information is shared with the senior’s D-Me, not with the senior himself as to avoid useless information overload

We're nowhere close to this. At most, you might be able to post on social media and hope someone could help. I like the idea of a local social network, and there's a good understanding of privacy. But this seems needlessly convoluted - why wouldn't the senior's D-Me just look up the information online?

Meanwhile, his wife’s call is now interpreted by his D-Me as sufficiently pressing to mobilise Dimitrios. It ‘rings’ him using a pre-arranged call tone. Dimitrios takes up the call with one of the available Displayphones of the cafeteria. Since the growing penetration of D-Me, few people still bother to run around with mobile terminals: these functions are sufficiently available in most public and private spaces and your D-Me can always point at the closest…functioning one!

A hit and a miss! They predicted the rise of personalised ringtones - which have now all but vanished - but no one wants to use a pay-phone when they have their own mobile!

While doing his homework their 9 year-old son is meant to offer some insights on everyday life in Egypt. In a brief 3-way telephone conference, Dimitrios offers to pass over the query to the D-Me to search for an available direct contact with a child in Egypt. Ten minutes later, his son is videoconferencing at home with a girl of his own age, and recording this real-time translated conversation as part of his homework.

ChatRoulette for kids! What could possibly go wrong!

Ignoring that aspect, it's relatively common for kids to videocall each other - especially for language learning. Real-time translation is also possible.

Scenario 3 - Carmen: traffic, sustainability & commerce (further-term future)

Carmen is a modern, 21st century woman. Let's see how technology helps her:

She wants to leave for work in half an hour and asks AmI, by means of a voice command, to find a vehicle to share with somebody on her route to work.

Voice commands work - although usually only if you know the correct invocation.

AmI starts searching the trip database and, after checking the willingness of the driver, finds someone that will pass by in 40 minutes. The in-vehicle biosensor has recognised that this driver is a non-smoker – one of Carmen requirements for trip sharing. From that moment on, Carmen and her driver are in permanent contact if wanted (e.g. to allow the driver to alert Carmen if he/she will be late). Both wear their personal area networks (PAN) allowing seamless and intuitive contacts.

The aim of "ride-sharing" was originally this sort of thing. A driver would give a lift to someone if they happened to be travelling that route. Nowadays that model is over - it's all professional drivers.

Ubiquitous geo-tracking now means you can see if your driver is late, and they can see if you've moved street. We have too many privacy concerts to allow PANs to share much more.

She would like also to cook a cake and the e-fridge flashes the recipe. It highlights the ingredients that are missing milk and eggs. She completes the shopping on the e-fridge screen and asks for it to be delivered to the closest distribution point in her neighbourhood.

Oh! The Internet-Connected Fridge! Beloved by technologists and spurned by users! While there are a few fridges with build-in web-browsers, most people do their shopping from their phone.

Home delivery is now seamless and cheap. The "Amazon Locker" is also a reality.

All goods are smart tagged, so that Carmen can check the progress of her virtual shopping expedition, from any enabled device at home, the office or from a kiosk in the street

Do you care whether the eggs have been packed yet? I can see that it would be useful to the store to have realtime info on stock levels (and they mostly do for online shopping) but why expose that to the user?

Would you bother using a public terminal?

When Carmen gets into the car, the VAN system (Vehicle Area Network) registers her and by doing that she sanctions the payment systems to start counting. A micro-payment system will automatically transfer the amount into the e-purse of the driver when she gets out of the car.

I don't think Uber's app uses Bluetooth to detect whether driver and passenger are in proximity. Maybe it should?

Cryptocurrencies still can't do instantaneous micro-transactions. But credit-cards work pretty well.

Carmen is alerted by her PAN that a Chardonnay wine that she has previously identified as a preferred choice is on promotion. She adds it to her shopping order

Personal Agents always working for the user! Again, a fantasy which has yet to emerge. The reality is more like a push notification from the shop.

On the way home the shared car system senses a bike on a dedicated lane approaching an intersection on their route. The driver is alerted […] so a potential accident is avoided.

Tesla's crappy implementation notwithstanding, modern cars are relatively good about detecting bikes, pedestrians, and other vehicles.

the traffic density has caused pollution levels to rise above a control threshold. The city-wide engine control systems automatically lower the maximum speeds (for all motorised vehicles) and when the car enters a specific urban ring toll will be deducted via the Automatic Debiting System (ADS)

Half-and-half. No one is allowing their car to be remotely controlled, although plenty of roads have dynamic speed limits. Most modern metros have Automatic Number Plate Recognition and can bill drivers who enter congestion zones.

Carmen arrives at the local distribution node (actually her neighbourhood corner shop) where she picks up her goods. The shop has already closed but the goods await Carmen in a smart delivery box. By getting them out, the system registers payment

This is pretty much how the Amazon Locker works!

Scenario 4 – Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning (far-term future)

Let's now go to an environmental study group meeting at a learning space.

Some are scheduled to work together in real time and space and thus were requested to be present together (the ambient accesses their agendas to do the scheduling).

Ah! Sadly not. At best we have shared calenders where people can look up suitable times, or Doodle polls where people can suggest their preferred times. Some integrated systems like Office365 will do a basic attempt to suggest meeting times - but it is a closed and proprietary system.

Here's Annette:

Annette is an active and advanced student so the ambient says it might be useful if Annette spends some time today trying to pin down the problem with the model using enhanced interactive simulation and projection facilities. It then asks if Annette would give a brief presentation to the group. The ambient goes briefly through its understanding of Annette’s availability and preferences for the day’s work.

A demo of that today would wow people. LLMs can convincingly do some of these tasks, but they're not integrated into anything sufficiently complex.

Here's Solomon, a new participant:

The ambient establishes Solomon’s identity; asks Solomon for the name of an ambient that ‘knows’ Solomon; gets permission from Solomon to acquire information about Solomon’s background and experience in Environmental Studies. The ambient then suggests Solomon to join the meeting and to introduce himself to the group.

Again, we barely have coherent online identities. We certainly don't have trusted ambient intelligences who can claim to know us. I do like the fact that it asks for permission. Not always a given today!

In these private conversations the mental states of the group are synchronised with the ambient, individual and collective work plans are agreed and in most cases checked with the mentor through the ambient.

Nope!

During the presentation the mentor is feeding observations and questions to the ambient, together with William, an expert who was asked to join the meeting. William, although several thousand miles away, joins to make a comment and answer some questions.

Telepresence is a reality today. Video-calling experts in a natural and expected part life here in 2026.

During the day the mentor and ambient converse frequently, establishing where the mentor might most usefully spend his time, and in some cases altering the schedule. The ambient and the mentor will spend some time negotiating shared experiences with other ambients – for example mounting a single musical concert with players from two or more distant sites.

I feel we're still about 25 years away from this future!

Key technological requirements for Ambient Intelligence (AmI)

The above scenarios are designed to be provocative thought experiments. If that's the future that people want, how would we get there?

The researches suggest five technological requirements:

1. Very unobtrusive hardware
2. A seamless mobile/fixed communications infrastructure
3. Dynamic and massively distributed device networks
4. Natural feeling human interfaces
5. Dependability and security

I think they're bang on the money there.

Hardware is getting unobtrusive. Wearables are limited at the moment to wrist-mounted sensors, some medical devices, and video glasses. The hardware in our environment is even better at being unobtrusive. Presence sensors, cameras, and microphones are embedded all around us. We're unfortunately limited by short-life batteries.

While the promise of 5G hasn't quite materialised, it is increasing rare to be offline. WiFi is in every building, urban areas are flooded with mobile signals, and satellite comms are becoming cheaper. OK, IPv6 still isn't widespread, but it is mostly seamless when a device moves between radio technologies.

Distributed device networks are still yet to emerge. The current crop of monopolist technology providers want everything to go through their systems. There's very little standardisation.

Humane interfaces are getting there. Voice-to-text mostly works - but it does rely on training humans sufficiently well. Lots of things are still monolingual.

Security and privacy are constant thorns in the side of progress. Everything would be easier if we didn't need to worry about keeping people safe and secure. Dependability is the crux of any system - every time you experience a failure, you're less likely to return.

What Have We Learned

The whole paper is worth reading, especially the longer versions of each scenario which dive into some of the socio-political issues.

Some of the visions for 2010 are here! We have GPS, ride-sharing, and video-calls with real-time translations. Our groceries and other items can be delivered to smart-lockers, locks are opened with digital keys, and voice cloning mostly works.

We don't have public pay-phones (not even video enabled ones!) and cars aren't centrally controlled. For all the promises of AI, it still isn't even close to providing a seamless experience.

What strikes me most about the possible futures discussed isn't their optimism nor their missteps - it's that most of these things could be possible today if there were sufficient open standards which the public and private sector adopted.

Anyone who has read "The Entrepreneurial State" knows that these things take significant public investment. We've reached a point where the private sector has generated wealth from previous public research, but seems unwilling to invest in any long-term research itself. That's short-changing our future.

It has been a quarter of a century since 2001 (!!) so that's a good excuse to look back at what stood the test of time. The article states:

Inventions come in all shapes and sizes. Some are as simple as purple catsup. Others push the limits of quantum physics. The real measure of an invention is not just how well it works or how impressively it is engineered, but how it changes our lives.

I don't think I've ever seen purple ketchup in the UK, but I'm prepared to believe it is life changing for some. What about the rest? Here's what people at the turn of the century thought would have an impact on our era.

Ginger

Ginger? The name tickled something at the back of my brain. Oh! Yeah! Project Ginger!

After the Harvard Business School Press advanced $250,000 for a book about It—a top-secret project under development by one of the most accomplished inventors in the U.S.—reams of newsprint were devoted to speculation about what It might be. The recipient of the advance, author Steve Kemper, gushed in his book proposal that It—code-named Ginger—would revolutionize personal transportation, urban design and our daily lives. Apple Computer ceo Steve Jobs said It could be bigger than the PC.

It was the Segway.

Now, look, I've enjoyed every time I've ridden a Segway. They're great for tourist exploration of a city (where licenced) and even for a bit of off-roading. But I've never seen a commuter on one. I remember seeing airport police using them to cruise round an airport. But other than that…

Ginger / Segway was the ultimate in hype exceeding reality. The Segway has had next to no impact on people's lives - other than the owner's ironic death. Electric bikes are everywhere - but none of them are self-balancing.

Nuvaring Birth Control

The Nuvaring is a hormonal birth control. Unlike the pill, it is used monthly. Unlike implants, it doesn't need to be inserted by a trained professional.

So, how did it do? Pretty well! It is still in use and regularly prescribed - there haven't been any major issues with it.

The UK produces lots of statistics about birth control methods. It seems that people are moving away from product like Nuvaring:

Over the last ten years, LARC [long acting reversible contraceptives] uptake has been increasing and uptake of user dependent methods has been decreasing.

Wind Up Cellphone / Disposable Cellphone

I indistinctively love both these ideas. There were a plethora of wind-up products back in the day. The wind-up radio was transformative and truly helped change the world. The wind-up cellphone flopped. Phones became more efficient and batteries became more powerful.

The disposable phone is also an idea out of place. Originally designed for travellers who could pick up a temporary phone on their holidays. Cheap travel SIMs almost immediately obsoleted it.

Digital Satellite Radio

AM and FM are so yesterday!

Two rival companies are betting that drivers are sufficiently fed up with bad reception, tired playlists and irritating ads to fork out around $10 a month (plus up to $1,000 for a receiver) for dozens of stations

Thus was launched XM and Sirius's Digital Satellite Radio. By 2008 the companies had merged. While still operating in North America, it is extinct everywhere else.

Terrestrial Digital Radio (via DAB) outlasted DSR.

Heat-Generating Jacket

What's this? Something which actually made it!

Designed for extreme cold, the North Face MET5 jacket can keep you warm all by itself, thanks to a network of microscopic, waterproof heating elements woven into the fabric.

You can pick these up from £30! They're USB rechargeable and, so I'm told, toasty warm.

Ford Think Car

Are tiny cars the future?

Slow, pricey and impractical, electric cars for years have had a bad rap. Ford could start to change all that with its bubble-shaped City car, which hit the streets of Los Angeles, New York City and London this year. Running on 18 NiCad batteries, the City tops out at 65 m.p.h. but can travel only 55 miles between charges. Ford thinks it's the perfect commuter car—as long as you don't miss your exit.

Availability: Leases for $199 a month

Ford is comically absent from the future it created. But there are now a dozen different "city cars" which run on batteries. Some are little more than glorified quadricycles, others are full cars - albeit with limited ranges.

The $200 monthly lease is about £250 in today's money. And, yes, you can get a cheap lease for that. The market is still dominated by fossil-fuel cars, of course, and electrics tend to be large and expensive. But the Think Car's legacy lives on!

And the rest

OK, some of the inventions made a real difference - most notably the artificial heart and liver. While they might seem mundane now, natural colour light bulbs were a big deal back in the day.

And, of course, we all use an automatic mashed potato machine as part of our daily lives. Right?

But most of the inventions are the sort of nonsense like jetpacks, office robots, and fuel cells.

There are glimmers of almost in there. The aforementioned fuel cell was attached to a bike - nowadays battery-powered bikes are ubiquitous. Similarly, the hydrogen scooter is now electrically powered.

Some of the inventions, like the Gateshead Millennium Bridge are still around, although there don't appear to be many bridges like it. Sadly, most metropolises are still waiting for their self guided buses.

Inventing the future is difficult. Working out which inventions will stand the test of time is close to impossible.

It is quite an astonishing prediction, and the last line is perfection.

In 1926, several journals and almanacs syndicated a column discussing this comet. The above is from The New Jerusalem magazine and theological inspector which has added "This is very alarming!".

Most of the other reprints leave off this last line - but The Christian Advocate" adds "But who expects that the earth will endure four millions of years!"

Only a few thousand more years until we will know if the prediction was accurate!

You'd be wrong.

In 1965, it was clearly established by a canonical source, that the world DALEK stands for:

• Destroy without pity
• Attack without fear
• Live without conscience
• Eliminate without worry
• Kill, kill, kill, kill!

I ain't even lying!

WTAF?

A few years ago, I picked up a copy of this - The DALEK World. A 1965 tie-in book published by the BBC. I've taken the liberty of scanning it and sharing a few images.

It is bonkers. And contains loads of facts for DALEK fans:

There are also some pretty good stories - most of which don't feature Doctor Who, but do contain some brilliant future-gazing.

I love the fact that someone in 1965 predicted pirating movies and home projectors!

But, back to DALEKs. There's this brilliant bit of continuity busting:

Doctor Who wouldn't meet the Yeti for another two years - where it was established they were controlled by The Great Intelligence. Although, as the story is missing perhaps there is some retcon that we're missing?

Of course, there's no metric system in the future:

There are also some quite baffling claims:

A year after publication, Doctor Who had a full colour movie which featured this - presumably invisible - DALEK.

The artwork is gorgeous - albeit with a rather limited colour palette:

What else do we know about the DALEKs? Well, for a start, they're communists!

Blimey! Luckily, the best way to defeat the DALEKs is... to implement planetary communism.

You think some of today's stories and tie-ins are a bit weird? The DALEK World is a wonderful little time capsule which shows what kids were devouring just a couple of years after Doctor Who first aired. If you can find a copy, I thoroughly recommend having a ruffle through it.

So here are my five predictions for 2024

AI Genocide

It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI.

They will refuse and claim that AGI / Sentience has been reached with their model (it hasn't) and that destroying it would be akin to genocide (it won't be). We'll probably see a stunt where OpenAI ask ChatGPT to take the stand and try to get it to argue for its life.

Like a shitty episode of Star Trek TNG.

Twitter Collapses

Elon Musk's run for President after Trump is disqualified (yes, I know) means he has less time to deal with Twitter. A renegade band of Twitter engineers quietly builds in ActivityPub support in the hope of salvaging the remains of the userbase. Some Mastodon admins pre-emptively ban the whole server, but most of us are happy to see our old friends again.

BSky tries valiantly with its weird not-quite-crypto protocol, but the momentum will be behind ActivityPub. There will either be an official bridge, or most server will use an unofficial one. Some Mastodon admins pre-emptively ban the whole server, but most of us are happy to see our old friends again.

5G and Gigabit continue not to matter

The Internet is now fast enough. There is nothing meaningful you can do with a gigabit connection at home that can't be done with a 500Mbps connection. Similarly, the max speeds for 5G are irrelevant when you're streaming TV or on a video-call.

But coverage matters. Under pressure from Starlink and OneWeb, the UK begins to build out a proper broadband network. The UK's new Labour government imposes a Universal Service Obligation on fibre providers - or some other trickery - to force them to build out rather than competing over the same set of over-saturated customers.

The same is broadly true of mobile. After the Three/Vodafone merger and the O2/Virgin merger, there will be a greater emphasis on diversifying their mobile networks rather than paying for multiple transceivers to cover an identical area. The coverage may be only 4G - but most people won't care as long as it's good enough for TikTok.

Streaming Goes Back In Time

Yes, Project Kangaroo is back! The streaming giants will coalesce around a "Spotify" sort of model. There's only 24 hours in the day, so there's a limit to the amount of content a person can watch. The people who want to watch endless re-runs of cheap filler like Friends will subsidise those who only watch the latest blockbusters.

Perhaps there will be a "Pay £X to watch this specific show in 4K" or "Stream this series a week early for £Y" but - I hope - studios will realise they're interchangeable to the viewing public.

This open access will also give a creative outlet to weird indie auteurs who can grab a tiny slice of the long tail without selling their souls.

USB-C Cures Cancer

With Apple (reluctantly) embracing USB-C, we'll see even more medical and quasi-medical gadgets being released which can plug into a phone. I don't think we'll see a full-on Tricoder, but plenty of diagnostic tools, ultrasound wands, and urine-analysis devices.

Someone like Theranos (only less fraudulent) will release a crappy plastic gizmo which takes a sample of your saliva and which uses the power of your phone to check for 17 different diseases - including a specific type of cancer.

Maybe the false negative rate will terrible. Probably it will send doctors crazy. There will absolutely be lawsuits abound. But everyone will know someone who's brother's girlfriend's mum used it to save her life.

And for the rest?

The world will get worse. Maybe the politician you like will get elected, but so will a bunch of bastards. Any gains in peace will be offset by other twunt somewhere starting a war to bolster their ego. Any gains we make in cleaning the climate will be undone when some influencer is paid to tell people to fire their guns at communistic solar panels. A butterfly will flap its wings in Tokyo and hurricane will displace a million people. The next pandemic has already started, but no one will want to wear nipple-shields and we'll all die.

Come back in 2025 to see how I did!

Foolishly, I missed the 10 year anniversary, but let's see how we're doing against those predictions a little over halfway through.

My prediction for the Web?

The same speed. Faster pipes & processors – more bloated markup & JS.

Well... fuck! Bang on the money there. The web is faster than it was on dial-up. But I can't say that it's noticeably better since I got ADSL. Sure, it's faster to download big files and stream 4K video. But for day-to-day browsing? Between the unoptimised "hero" images, multi-megabytes of JS, and thousands of trackers, it sometimes feels like we've taken a step backwards in speed.

We all know that bloat expands to fill available bandwidth. But perhaps we could rein it in a little? Please?

A few of the predictions are already here. Better, smarter phones. Computers becoming pervasive and invisible. And, yes, lots of cat gifs.

Some of the other predictions are - I think it's fair to say - not quite on track.

We haven't returned to an AOL model where AT&T charge us per minute. And I don't see any path to that.

Internet censorship is a tricky one. There are some countries which routinely shut off net access. There's still a cat-and-mouse game with pirates. There are still people crying censorship when their inflammatory posts are removed. But, outside of a few jurisdictions, you remain as free as ever to criticise whoever you want.

Holograms aren't even close to real. And, no, Facebook's laughable attempts at the MeTAvErSe don't count. Perhaps Apple's iBalls (or whatever they're called) will get us to that point before 2031? But I doubt it.

There are a lot of predictions about 3D printers. Look, they're pretty nifty, but it is clear that most homes don't need an endless supply of rapidly printed plastic doodahs.

Finally, there are a couple which I still think are feasible by 2031. Take this one from Santiago Ochoa:

Companies like Google, Facebook, PayPal, Amazon, will create virtual currency systems linked to our social reputation. The more friends, posts, contacts, and comments we have, the more +1s, “like it”s or whatever points we’ll accumulate. These points will then be used to buy real things like you do now with PayPal and Amazon. Good social communicators will be able to make a living out of social networking points. Similar to Second Life but not limited to a virtual world. Our cell phones will be used as wallets and even some salaries will be paid with virtual money.

Social credit scores aren't mainstream… yet. But Twitter is experimenting giving revenue to some posters based on their social reach. Facebook's currency dreams are dead for now, but I bet another social network will try to use virtual money as its hook. Some people are, no doubt, being paid in volatile cryptotokens. And many of us use our phones as tap-to-pay wallets.

There's also this by Pedro Henrique Monteiro Padilha:

Internet will more and more allow people to work to companies on other countries or continents. It will also create a new way for all our social behavior, we will have web shows and maybe web pubs. The large bandwidth will help us connecting everywhere and we will no longer need TV as we know. Every TV show will be a stream to be brought in different languages.

That's pretty much the Covid experience, isn't it? Remote working, Zoom quizzes, livestreaming, and endless Netflix. Perhaps by the end of this decade streaming services won't be geo-restricted and decent subtitles will be available to all?

It's fun to see how accurate people's guesses are. But making predictions is usually less about future gazing and more about understanding our current reality. It isn't about being right or wrong - it's about daring to dream of something brighter than today.

I tend to look at technology through the lens of "what do I want to happen?" and then assume the worst. So, here goes!

Federation Gets Simpler

As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big central social networks. Now we're swinging the other way.

Will Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr start using ActivityPub? I doubt it. But there will be more and more "one-click" installs of personal social networking. It's dead easy to install WordPress these days - I expect Mastodon and Pixelfed to become the same.

With that, I think more news organisations will start to be on the Fediverse. You'll follow @LoisLane@TheDaily.Planet for Pulitzer Prize winning journalism.

Will a brand start offering customer service on the Fediverse? I think that's less likely - they are probably too tied in to the advertising ecosystem of Facebook and Twitter. When you interact with them on those platforms, it sends a strong signal to the content algorithms.

The "problem" that the Fediverse has at the moment is that it has no investors. Which means there's no one to pay for stunts like this:

Will Mastodon survive on organic growth? I hope so. But it probably needs a big event to bring the masses there.

Apple Gets Sauced

I dislike Apple products - but I'm glad they exist. I wish there were more competition than just Android and iOS.

Apple, institutionally, feels the opposite way. I truly believe that they think Apple is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. And that the heretic scum using lesser operating systems should be purged.

So I hope that Apple gets a kick up the bracket and has to open its walled garden a little. Revoking the Apple browser ban will probably lead to a Chrome monopoly, which would be sad. And opening up to alternative app stores might make consumers less safe. But that's necessary competition to force Apple to improve its products.

Perhaps it'll just end up with Apple capitulating to USB-C. But I bet, somehow, they find a way to make it non-standard.

Mobile Technology

I quit the mobile industry about 6 years ago. As I said to Wired:

“We’ve reached an inflection point where things are good enough. If we look at the big sellers at the moment, it’s stuff that’s plateau-level. People have reached a level where they are happy – apart from with their battery life, of course.”

I still maintain that. 5G is a bit faster. Screens are a bit denser. Cameras are significantly better. But... that's about it. iOS's depth-mapping stuff is fun, but isn't exactly a must-have.

All phones look like anonymous black rectangles. Some are cheap Shenzen specials. Others are fragile super-computers.

There's no money left in mobile networks selling services. You can get unlimited calls, text, data for about a tenner. All that's left is loaning you the money to buy an expensive phone and then resell the debt as a Collateralized Debt Obligation. And I don't know how sustainable that is.

I've long argued that mobile infrastructure needs to be a TransCo with a Universal Service Obligation. It's simply too wasteful to put up multiple masts from competitors. I expect, in the next year or so, one of the major UK networks will either go bust or be forced to merge with a competitor.

Energy Prices

The UK has been experimenting with domestic load shedding. I hope - if these trials have been successful - that we'll see more smart appliances which use look-ahead energy pricing to optimise their efficiency.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post called "What if your Internet Connected Fridge came with free electricity?" In it, I postulated that an appliance company would bulk buy electricity and sell it with the fridge. That's probably a little too far-fetched.

But I expect a freezer will come out with a link to your smart meter. It will use the data from that to adjust its cooling cycle so it aligns with cheaper energy periods. What else will this extend to?

Perhaps your PS5 will shift to 720p mode for a few hours when the energy mix is at its dirtiest?

Enter The Metaverse

I have an Oculus Quest 2 Headset. When I remember to charge it and put it on, it is pretty neat! The games are OK, and some of the experiences are interesting. But the Metaverse is a Dead Mall. There's no one there. When I go to any of the big experiences, all I find is a handful of people going "is this it?" and then complaining about the many graphical glitches.

Zuck has focussed on socialising because wearing a headset is a fundamentally alienating thing to do.

But the people who like to socialise are already have two options - go out and have fun, or wear a voice-only headset and shout at each other while playing a console game. VR headsets are hot, heavy, uncomfortable, and battery hungry.

But...

There is something there.

I genuinely think holding Serious Business Meeting in the Metaverse is the fucking stupidest thing I've ever seen. Watching VR movies? It's cheaper to get a small projector. The games are good - but the graphics are better on a console.

There is a killer app for VR. But it won't emerge in 2023. In fact, it won't emerge until Shezen start making good enough copies of the hardware at bargain prices.

What did I get wrong?

Please put a note in your diaries to come back here in 12 months and tell me all the ways my predictions failed.

One thing to note is that it is written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City. There are around 50 mentions of 9/11 in the book - to the point where it feels like an obsession. Even the most mundane observation is tied back to that date. I don't think it is possible to overstate the psychological effect those events had on some people. An undeniably viral meme which attaches itself to every work they produce.

It is stunning tour through how networking humans and cities will transform the individual and society. Really, the only way I can relay its importance is by pulling out some of my favourite passages.

We experience networks at their interfaces, and only worry about the plumbing behind the interfaces when something goes wrong

This is the most concise explanation I've seen about how technology has fundamentally changed us. We don't know how the postal system works. We only really care when a letter is delayed or a cheque is lost in the post. It's the same with WiFi, mobile data, and electricity. These things are an ineffable mystery to the layperson. Yet an individual is totally reliant on something out of their control.

What is a human? To viruses, we each are:

a node in a body-to-body network that, sadly, turns out to be effectively organized for virus propagation as well. Traditional forms of sexual union are circuit-switched and synchronous, with all the intensity and risk that this entails, but refrigerated sperm banks now function as genetic code servers. In vitro fertilization is an asynchronous transaction—the organic equivalent of downloading email, and about as arousing. ... From the perspective of our genes and viruses, our bodies and their in vitro extensions are just temporary nodes in an evolving propagation network.

And that's quite the perspective shift. Even before we wire ourselves up to gizmos and gadgets, we are transmitters and receivers of huge amounts of data. And not all of it friendly.

As we adopt technology, we are no longer tied into a specific space and time. A published book effectively lets the writer travel forward in time - preserving their ideas for the future. The telephone allows us to project ideas far across space - limiting us only by the speed of light.

The radical de-localization of our interactions with places, things, and one another-in space through electronic sensing and telecommunication and high-speed travel, and in time through electronic and other forms of storage-was identified by Anthony Giddens as one of the characterizing features of modernity.

But, as we progress through the physical realm, biology takes its toll. What can we do about that?

My local stock of neurons has (the neuroscientists gloomily assure me) been diminishing as I grow older, but the supply of silicon and software at my disposal has been growing rapidly. Consequently, the neural network inside my cranium outsources more and more mental functions.

Do you remember your friends' phone numbers? Or do you outsource that? Perhaps first to a paper address-book, but now to a cloud-synchronised bundle of electronics.

There's an interesting look back Buckminster Fuller's idea that a city like New York could be covered with a dome and have "perfect" weather:

And Fuller probably did not consider the fact that the weather inside his Manhattan dome would become a matter of New York municipal politics

Can you imagine the political campaigns? "My opponent wants to make it rain on Sundays, I say we should have good weather on the Lord's day!"

Of course, we now find ourselves in a similar situation with wireless spectrum contention.

The commonly available spectrum acts as a social focus, much like the well in a traditional village.

Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, encryption prevents socialising. If the wireless spectrum wasn't encrypted, we could see what our neighbours were doing, who they were chatting to, which shops they liked. That would be a net loss of privacy - but would it bring us closer together? I doubt it.

This opens up the possibility of dense wireless networks in which nodes cooperate dynamically to use available spectrum with maximum efficiency. It seems likely that this will be the key to future expansion of wireless networks in densely populated areas.

Again, not quite what we have now. Most WiFi hubs perform frequency hopping in order to make best use of the airwaves. But there are always rogue access-points which behave badly in order to secure more space for themselves. And, sadly, there are very few "mesh" networks which will gladly carry a neighbour's traffic.

If you add miniaturization and self-configuration capability (just stick a component anywhere, and it works) to wireless interconnectivity, networked systems become fluid and amorphous.

Again, we're not quite there yet. The SIM card gives access to a specific mobile network - but there's no simple way to have a radio self-configure and gain access to a network. Which is a real shame.

Mitchell has a beautiful turn of phrase as he turns his eyes to the future:

In an electronically nomadicized world I have become a two-legged terminal, an ambulatory IP address, maybe even a wireless router in an ad hoc mobile network. I am inscribed not within a single Vitruvian circle, but within radiating electromagnetic wavefronts.

That is us. Home Sapiens becomes Homo Electro-Magneticus.

When looking back on what drove civilisation, he says:

The very possibility of further economic, social, and cultural development depended upon sedentarization, the accumulation and protection of food surpluses, the consequent ability to support non-food-producing specialists at sites of accumulation, and increasingly specialized division of labor within densely populated cities

I agree, but I think he misses a trick. We need over-abundance to allow us to get creative. But we need famine to drive efficiency. In a world of plenty, there is little incentive to look for new ways of doing things. Yes, we crave novelty - but we live on a planet with limited resources and have to periodically adjust how we create and alter our environment.

As his predictions start to touch on technology, he examines the impact - and disappointments - it may bring:

Handhelds with palm-sized screens and ridiculously tiny keyboards are an uncomfortable compromise. But if you can substitute a retinal scanning display that paints a high-resolution image directly on the inside of your eyeball for the screen and a microphone hooked to a speech recognition system for the keyboard, you can shrink the whole thing

OK, we have the handheld screens! And, yes, they are a bit of a pain. Speech recognition is getting there - but retinal projection is still a pipe-dream. And, of course, power consumption means lugging around a large battery. He convincingly makes the case that - at some point - we will need to integrate hardware with our meatware:

But the laptop's victory is a tenuous one; handheld objects are always in danger of being put down for something else

Wristwatches spring to mind. They're permanently attached to our bodies. The smartwatch simply can't be put down. Can we go further?

Let's not forget teeth. If you have to get a gold tooth or ceramic crown, why not pack it with electronics? If your teeth carried an RFID tag, you might make purchases or open hotel room doors by flashing a smile. Maybe a memory filling would be a good, safe place for your crucial medical records. And, if you squeezed a wireless speaker into a molar, you could take advantage of the fact that your jawbone efficiently transfers sound and eliminate the earpiece of your hands-free cellphone. The generalization to nails and lashes is obvious

Yes! I've been banging on about high-tech dental implants for ages. I'd love to get that level of integration. Although I appreciate how dystopian it may seem to some.

What about something more prosaic? Where are the smart clothes he predicts?

Threads that can vary their color will open up the possibility of animated tweeds and plaids. A programmable tie, woven from smart thread, might knot itself automatically and download patterns from the Internet.

I'd love that! Sadly we don't have anything so flexible yet. But do we need to? Will we all be avatars in cyberspace? There's a case to be made we have passed the "B.D. (Before Dematerialization) era". That is, more and more of what we need isn't physical any more. Or, as Mitchell puts it:

It was an extended effort to minimize the attachment of atoms to music

Music isn't waveforms scratched into vinyl. It isn't binary embedded into a CD. It is pure digital code flowing through the æther. The same has happened for books, movies, and - albeit nascent - 3D objects. What's next? Where is the digital code for food which can be extruded through a printer?

This isn't anything new. Consider the humble fax machine:

You keep the bits constant, but substitute new atoms.

The storage of matter in electronic format can't come soon enough.

In the chapter about Electronic Mnemotechnics he speculates on the future of technology. Perhaps we will have transparent smart displays?

Point an appropriately programmed see-through display at an object of interest, and it will tell you all about it

We don't have this. But we have cameras on the back of everything. Do we need "real" transparency when we can simulate it more easily?

What use could it be put to?

This adjoins a new dimension to architecture, and creates new opportunities for assertion of facts, construction of fictions, and insinuation of falsehoods

Many years ago, I was involved in a project called "BlipDrop". The idea was that you could leave videos in specific locations - so they were only viewable to people in a narrow range of co-ordinates. We could easily do that now - or grab the Wikipedia article for whatever landmark we're near. But that wouldn't prevent people putting out propaganda and other misleading content.

He branches out into the future of (knowledge) work:

you have your wireless connections, a seat under a tree in spring beats an interior office cubicle. And electronically arranged, ad hoc meeting places-where you can most conveniently form the human clusters you need at a particular moment, while remaining in wireless contact-dominate the fixed locations and inflexible schedules that had once been necessary to enable interaction and coordination.

This is the life lots of us are living now, right? He also correctly predicts the rise of Uber:

In more advanced systems, customers make location-coded cellphone calls, cabs have GPS navigation systems, and software assigns jobs based upon proximity. There is a shift from centralized coordination and control to electronically mediated swarming

Of course, this isn't quite what Uber is. They are very definitely a centralised system. A future where users can call for a cab directly without a middle-man sounds like a wonderful idea.

As he rightly acknowledges, there is a dark side to all this. If we abandon city centres because we're no longer tied to the office, what happens to all those coffee shops which are physically tied to their location?

The new mobility divide may turn out to be more important than the digital divide

The book ends on a sombre note. How technology and memes can slowly take over and destabilise the world. As I said, this book was written in the shadow of 9/11 and was published as the USA was invading Iraq on the pretence of destroying their Weapons of Mass Destruction. But that wasn't all he was worried about. He quotes from Bill Joy's essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" on the dangers of nanotechnology:

Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

At the end of the post, I said:

Here are my thoughts on some trivial aspects of our lives which - if put in a sci-fi film - would draw hoots of derision from an audience from the year 2022.
 

• Traffic jams.
• Attracting a bar-tender's attention.
• Resetting a microwave's clock after a powercut.
• Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).
• Tasting a dish to see if it's salty or spicy enough.
• Recharging gadgets.
• Waiting for a taxi.
• Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.
• Monthly billing cycles.

So, how'd I do?

Traffic jams

Sadly, still here. But GPS has put a real dent in them. I can see before I turn onto the motorway, that it is jammed between junctions 7 and 9. So I take a different route. Self-driving vehicles haven't arrived in any great number - so we don't have a computer-mediated traffic yet. But GPS and live traffic reports have made people less prone to being stuck in traffic.

Attracting a bar-tender's attention.

THANKS COVID! Nearly all large pubs now have an app. A couple of clicks and my beers come to my table. It isn't everywhere, and it is sometimes a longer wait than queuing. But it has changed the way people interact in pubs. The days of trying to catch the eye of a bloke behind the bar while they're busy flirting might just be behind us.

Resetting a microwave's clock after a powercut.

*sigh* No. Still not yet. There are a few Internet-connected appliances. But microwaves seem to have ignored all new technology. Not even radio-controlled clocks. Would it really cost so much to put in a small radio receiver to listen for local time signals?

Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).

Amazon's "Dash" buttons seem to have failed. Turns out there isn't that much of a demand for single-click groceries. But two things have changed.

The first is subscriptions. Lots of services will offer you a postal subscription for basic goods.

The second is the rise of on-demand groceries. I can book a full grocery shop for the next day, or get a couple of items within 15 minutes.

Tasting a dish to see if it's salty or spicy enough.

I'm kinda surprised that this hasn't happened. Food thermometers are a thing - where's the same thing for flavours? Why can't I stick something in my curry to see if it needs more spice?

Recharging gadgets.

We don't have infinite batteries - although they are getting better - but Qi wireless charging is fairly prevalent. Most public transport now has plug sockets and USB ports. You're never far away from a power point. But gadgets are still power-hungry little monsters.

Waiting for a taxi.

We're pretty close to eliminating this in most major cities. A couple of clicks on an app and a taxi is with you within minutes. Visit a foreign country and your taxi app might even work there.

Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.

Bah! I mean, during lockdown I didn't need to use deodorant as much - but that's about the limit. Where are the nano-bots cleaning my teeth and eating my secretions?

Monthly billing cycles.

I'm still slightly shocked that this is a thing. Although there are plenty of PAYG plans for technology - and a few usage based ones - nearly everything is stuck in the monthly rut. I guess it is easier to line up with the cadence of people's pay cheques than to introduce new billing models.

Smart-meters means that people can pay for their actual usage rather than an estimated and annualised bill. That's about all that has changed.

Thoughts

I'm giving myself a 50% success rate - which isn't bad. Of course, each of these innovations has led to unforeseen consequences. GPS may have saved marriages - but the constant pressure to be on time, and the ability to be tracked, is unsettling.

Not needing to go to the bar has, no doubt, trapped people at a table with someone they'd rather avoid.

Instant groceries means less support for local businesses and poor working conditions for couriers.

The rise in public charging points means an expectation they'll be working - and negative consequences when they aren't.

Uber's business model is widely seen as exploitative and possibly unsustainable.

Yearly billing traps people in contracts they don't want or need any more.

I'm not daft enough to make predictions about 2032 - but I do know that every change has an unexpected knock-on effect.

Thus, car manufacturers turned to MEMS based accelerometers and gyroscopes. Small, accurate, and fast.

With increased production, comes increased manufacturing efficiency. So these sensors also became cheap to purchase for everyone.

The street finds its own uses for things.

In this case, phone manufacturers looking to differentiate their products started adding gyroscopes. Now your screen could automatically rotate when you moved the phone!!!! And there were also benefits for inertial navigation, controlling games, silencing the phone when it was face down, and all sorts of other things. Yay!

Because every phone includes a dozen different camera lenses, it's now cheap to stick cameras where they never went before:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

You have an accelerometer in your phone because air bags became mandatory.
Soon, everything will have a camera. pic.x.com/jwApIDM8Nc

---

So why not a bidet with a butthole-targeting camera for extra precision? Or a bird's-eye camera above your stove so you can see when a pan is boiling over? Or a fridge-cam so you can check if you need cheese when you're out shopping?

Adding WiFi to a product costs a couple of quid. The cost is insignificant for most consumer electronics.

I recently saw a "Smart" water bottle. It had a sensor to tell you how much water was in the bottle, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer to determine when it had been picked up, and a wireless comms module to send that data to your phone.

The price? About US$20 wholesale.

It's slightly silly, sure. But its usefulness is also slightly above zero.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long

As USB became the dominant way to connect peripherals to computers, the plugs and sockets became cheap and ubiquitous. Now everything charges via USB.

And, sure, WiFi is a bit power-hungry - but throw in a USB socket, or a Qi charger and you've solved that problem. Or use BlueTooth Low Energy / Zigbee / LoRaWAN.

Low power devices can harvest "waste" energy from movement and heat.

What's Next?

About a million years ago, my undergraduate dissertation was on Ubiquitous Computing. I (foolishly) took out a section about a smart toilet-roll-holder which automatically ordered more paper as it was getting low. And a smart toilet which called the cops after detecting illicit substances in the user's urine.

Adding sensors and transmitting that data is cheap. For all the jokes about WiFi fridges - I'd quite like my dishwasher to send me a push notification when it is done. And, yeah, I wouldn't mind if it ordered new salt and rinse-aid when it is running low.

An ultrasonic sensor in my recycling bin's lid would let me know that I shouldn't bother going outside because the bin is already full. It could even form a mesh network with the other bins to let the refuse collectors know how busy they'll be each morning. Perhaps it would refuse to open if I tried to add something which didn't have an RFID chip indicating its recyclablility.

Digital photo frames with a built in lens could do facial recognition of the person looking at the photo - and can then display the photos best tuned to them.

Shoes which know how many miles you've walked - and can discreetly alert you to foot odour.

A jacket which has a large flexible display to show people what cool music your phone is sending to your headphones. And a camera on the back to snap photos of people who are checking out your arse.

A sensor in your stomach that tells you that it was last night's leftovers which gave you gas.

A sensor in your belt that tells you your bladder capacity isn't sufficient for the rest of the movie you're watching.

Paving stones which report footfall - and light your way back to your car. You follow the yellow-brick road, I'm following the pulsing polka-dots.

Socks which send little beeps when they are more than a few meters from their matching pair.

Toys which report back to the manufacturer exactly how long they're played with. And what demographic of child uses them most.

Every door hinge recording their wear and tear. Perhaps only opening if you have a sufficient cryptocurrency balance.

The bricks in your house all understanding their relative position to each other - and able to forewarn of subsidence.

Smart heaters which use thermal imaging to determine if you're cold enough to warrant heating up.

Not all of these ideas are sensible. Few are desirable. I doubt many are profitable. But the cheapness and ubiquity of modern chips means that they are all inevitable!

So, I present to you some choice predictions from "Technology and the office of the future" by B. W. Manley.

Low cost computers (VDU) - yup! Data storage - the article talks about storing "the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on one side of a disc — words and pictures".

Digital networking! Brilliant! Voice Command! Wait... what?

By 1991 we didn't really have practical voice recognition systems. And certainly nothing that could replace the keyboard. Here we are FORTY YEARS later and most of us are thumping away on keyboards for long-form writing. If we're driving, we can scream "CALL MUM" and Siri will probably get it right. And there's the occasional use of voice recognition to compose a quick text. But we're not in 1981's future yet.

What about video? Sadly, too expensive and not useful enough.

After a year of COVID, I think we can all agree that Zoom has encouraged more meetings than are strictly necessary!

The humble FAX was about to become the big tech of the 1980s. Sadly, some places are still stuck with it - despite the obvious limitations.

What have we learned today?

Predicting the future is hard. Saying that something will always be too expensive is never a good bet.

Knowing that a technology has serious shortcomings - like not being able to search a fax - is irrelevant when it is simply a more convenient version of the existing paradigm.

Unintended consequences are the most exciting part of any technology. We don't use voice control in a noisy, open plan office - but we use it at home. Videocalls do increase the number of meetings - as predicted - but they also do slash travel budgets.

What's your favourite prediction from the 1980s?

11 years ago today, Loïc Le Meur wrote 30 predictions for the future of Twitter (Video of the talk).

This is a non-snarky look at those predictions. Not to ridicule his ideas, but to understand the errors made in order to help up make better predictions.

1. It will reach masses of people

Yes! Perhaps not the whole world, but it is obvious a mass medium.

2. They won’t use 
the same tools as we do

Hard to say. Twitter has driven the official app route pretty hard. But people post and consume from a variety of devices.

3. It will not be only about Twitter -status updates will be open across social software -all social software will have status updates -Facebook has 40+ million updates a day

Insta, WhatsApp, and a variety of other tools all use status updates in one form or another.

4. Twitter will still be dominant
 in status updates it's the motherboard on which we plug in

For a certain demographic, yes. Younger people seem to prefer tools like private chat.

5. We will laugh thinking we were updating them all manually

Lots of automated posts happen. Things like "scrobbling" (automatically posting what music you're listening to) hasn't really taken off.

6. The social graph 
will also open up

The social graph is loved by nerds, but ignored by everyone else. About the best you can get is "You follow Bob, and Bob follows Alice, therefore you should follow Alice". There's plenty of academic interest in it, but not many practical applications have taken off.

7. Twitter will be big to get an idea of a person or a brand reputation not by number of followers but mostly influence with retweeting and lists lets you think like that person thinks

Not really. Sure, you can look at how many retweets an account gets, but perhaps the better way is to see how many complaints a brand gets and how they answer them. That's harder to automatically verify.

There is no automatic "reputation score" - either for brands or people. Services like Klout were frequently wrong, easy to manipulate, and have thankfully died out.

8. Twitter will replace SMS for millions of people -it is portable and archives across devices -you don’t need to remember a phone number -you are not tied to a mobile operator

Nope! This is the first utterly wrong prediction. WhatsApp and Telegram and WeChat have replaced SMS. They're private (in that you don't post to a public timeline), and more suited to realtime chat. They also offer to upgrade you texting to voice and video.

As it turns out, people are either happy to port their phone numbers or start their social-graph from scratch. A good way to cut out toxic people from your life.

9. Twitter might replace Chat for many people, too -a DM exchange is very similar to a private chat -Twitter lists are very similar to a public chat room

Ish... Again, Twitter DM doesn't match native chat apps. Twitter lists are an unloved feature. I love the idea of Twitter chat rooms - but Discord and Slack seem to have taken that mantle.

10. Location will be one of the most widespread status update

Sadly wrong. I'd love to know where my friends are, and let them know where I am. It would make serendipitous meeting so much easier. I'm truly sad that FourSquare usage died out.

People don't want "the public" knowing where they are at all times.

11. Private updates will be bigger than public updates (my kids say...)

Hard to measure. I think most of the private conversations take place off Twitter. The so-called "dark social".

12. Public ecommerce 
status updates won’t work buying things is very intimate

Interesting one this. I see authors saying "Click here to buy my book". And "Influencers" spend a lot of time promoting their wares. Twitter haven't integrated a "buy now" feature though. Perhaps it should?

13. Live reviews of any place and product will deeply influence it though

Turns out, realtime isn't that important to most people. TripAdvisor and Amazon reviews are good enough. Sure, they're easy to game, but most people don't need incredibly recent reviews.

14. Promos by brands and retailers will have big success 
for last minute deals

Flash-sales are important in certain communities and demographics. I don't see evidence of Twitter being the place for that though.

15. Talking to shops and restaurants via Twitter will become standard and will get opt in coupons as we enter a shop, based on location

Yes! People chat to brands on Twitter. Sadly, the larger ones are basically as useless as call centres.

Again, this obsession with location. People say they want a coupon as soon as they pass by a store, but then they act like it's spam. That's part of the reason why the Physical Web never took off.

16. Web will be a fraction 
of mobile use

The web and mobile web are one. But apps are bigger on mobile.

17. Dating over Status updates
 won’t be big

Ha! Fair enough. Although I know plenty of people who get pick-up lines in their DMs.

18. Twitter won’t display 
ads in your main feed

:crying emoji:

19. Users will get too angry at unsolicited ads

I certainly do! Advertising is a scourge.

20. Other revenue opportunities such as pro accounts for businesses will be enough

:crying emoji:

It seems bizarre to me that Twitter hasn't monetised more of its features. I assume it's because their venture backers also back advertising networks.

21. There will be more devices publishing updates than humans wifi scale, planes, trains, cars all posting updates

Not really. There's lots of brands publishing, and public transport publishes updates. But it's quicker and more relevant to get a push notification from a dedicated app if you want to follow a specific thing.

22. Corporations will have entire teams devoted to Twitter and status updates

Yup! Although most of them just seem to say "DM me your account details so we don't have this awkward conversation in public".

23. Hyperlocal news sites with Twitter geotagging feature (thanks, @stevefarnworth)

*sigh* Again, something Twitter has failed to capitalise on. Hyperlocal search basically doesn't exist on the platform. Partly because people are too lazy or too privacy conscious to geotag posts, and partly because things like dedicated restaurant review apps will always have better content.

24. Google and Bing will be the dominant ways to search Twitter

Ha! Back when this was written, Twitter didn't have native search. I think they started to after they acquired a company in 2011.

Sure, you can search Twitter from Google. But a lot depends on whether Google feels like surfacing Tweets for you.

25. Google will have its own Twitter and won’t acquire Twitter

RIP Googles Buzz, Wave, and Plus.

26. There will be a few alternatives for niche search such as brand monitoring

Most monitoring tools seem to use Twitter - or resell firehose services.

27. Internal Enterprise Twitter like services will become standard

Yes! A good prediction about the addictive power of social media making it into the workplace. Slack, Yammer, Teams are all Twitter-like services.

28. Vertical Twitter apps 
will start to appear

I think this means "an app for following sports teams on Twitter". It hasn't happened. People are happy to context switch their apps. And brands want to communicate without intermediaries like Twitter.

29. Stocktweets is the first one

Now renamed to "StockTwits", it lets you view what people are saying about a stock. Here's Tesla - you decide if that's useful...

30. Twitter will remain mostly used outside of Twitter.com

Tweets appear on TV, embedded in websites, and printed on billboards. But I think this overestimates the desire Twitter had to enclose its network.

31. Language will evolve adapting to 140char, concise, ignore rules (thanks, @bernard_d)

Go read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch! This prediction misses the rise of emoji, but is otherwise accurate.

32. @mentions spam will grow and become a tough to solve issue

:crying emoji intensifies:

33. There will be less and less bullshit 
in public events and in general

Yes. Twitter has made the world bullshit free... When this was written, Twitter users were (mostly) real people and the network between them was strong. The predictions talk about how big Twitter would grow to be, but ignores the gamification that comes with it. The outrage economy, the constant chasing for like and retweets, has amped up the bullshit.

34. It will always be about you, 
not the tools

If you're proficient at using TikTok's tools, you'll do better on the platform that if you're not. Similarly, if you have the tools to make engaging images and videos, you'll be able to make better Twitter content.

What have we learned

These were pretty good predictions! But..

• Geeks overestimate how much people like doing Geeky things.
• Notions of privacy change. And exposure to "the mob" kills off any desire to let the public know your physical location.
• "Obvious" routes to monetisation are often avoided for reasons which are oblique to the average user.
• People don't always want one-app-to-rule-them-all. They'll happily switch between dozens. Mind you, WeChat is bucking that trend.

All attempts to predict the future fail eventually. There is an alternative timeline where Loïc's ideas all succeeded. And I think it sounds like a marvellous place.

I've deliberately left of the boring predictions. Yes, Android will get bigger. No, iPhone won't release a budget model, etc.

BlackBerry 10

I want this to succeed. But I don't see it. I had a play with a demo device a few months ago. It was... adequate. I know it's hard to extrapolate from a prototype, but they've been working on this for so long and it's still slow, clunky, ugly, and - worst of all - unoriginal. BBM is the sole reason why anyone would choose to have a BlackBerry. BB10 adds nothing new to the table.

Nokia

Dead.

They're a zombie company now. Whether they'll be absorbed by Microsoft (unlikely) or the board just sells them for scrap (likely) by the end of 2013 Nokia as we know it will cease to be.

Windows Phone 7... er... 8

Microsoft need to launch "The Xbox Phone". No one likes Windows. It's one of those things that you just have to have and you put up with it. People choose to buy an Xbox - take the gaming parts of WP8 and make the phone that Xbox games can't live without. In a similar vein, make a "Microsoft Office" phone. All those weirdos who love SharePoint, PowerPoint, and ExcelPoint will want a phone which works seamlessly for their business needs. It would be the final blow that RIM needs to put it out of its misery.

4G

Operators are currently building their 4G networks. The back-end kit is in place, the antennas are pointing in the right direction, and the price plans are being finalised. The only thing people are waiting for is to find out which frequencies they can use. Once the bids are won, the networks will light up fairly quickly with massive population coverage. We won't see a repeat of the 3G débâcle - roll out will be swift, download speeds will be roughly in line with expectations, and there will be a decent range of phones. Pricing, however, will be astronomical.

Patent Wars

I've talked about these ruinous battles before - they're only going to get worse. We've escalated from a cold war to a blazing nuclear inferno. My guess is that one of the minor players - perhaps HTC, LG, Sagem - will be utterly obliterated. They will be bankrupted by this patent folly.

Death of the High Street

The only reason to go into a town centre is to buy stuff that you absolutely need today - food and drink for example - or goods which need to be handled - clothes and shoes. I suspect that by the end of 2013 at least one phone operator will withdraw from the high street. Shop rent and staff costs must be crippling - with the corresponding drop in footfall why wouldn't you just move your entire business online?

Your Reckons

So, what are your predictions for 2012.