(THE MOTHER OF ALL DISRUPTIONS) A.K.A. WHERE IS IT GOING NOW?

Posted on March 25, 2018 by Yann Tromeur

As long as I can remember, I have witnessed many incredible changes in our technologies our society was able to come up with.

Being an eighties kid made me positive for the tech stuff.

Born in the Seventies, I will pass quickly this decade, being too much of a young boy to really care or remember.  Well that was the kindergarten for the technologies to come: first PC (Apple garage), floppies (data transport), Birth of Video Games.

That decade prepared for the big one: the 80’s and the dawn of mass market for IT. Big a** screens and huge desktops: Computers were raiding homes and offices. Terminator in the movies: Machines will replace us!

Safely, we arrived to the Nineties and the birth of the Internet. Remember the “World Wide Web”?

That’s the decade I decided to be an IT guy, owning in 94 a 56Kbps (yes bps) modem and AOL account.

So until the late nineties, Computing Technologies were present but were just birthing. Computers were not cheap, they were still slow for some stuff, email was not the best way to communicate with each other professionally. Not really a disruption so far, just breakthroughs.

IT Disruptions

The first disruption for me was the two thousands (00s), the internet just starting to rule the world: shaping our daily work and life, changing the economy and communications forever. Information could be transmitted faster than ever. Our lives would never be the same again. Google, Amazon, Facebook, you name them!

The second disruption came fast and accelerated the first one : with the birth of Mass cell phones networks, we are touching the world using our smartphones, daily, hourly, minutely… you know: the distance are not there anymore. Webcams, google earth, instant access to your friends or favorite shop. You can hail a car as soon as you arrive at the airport. The Cloud !

It’s now 2018.

After fifty years of relentless technological progress, what will IT, bring us to the next decade?

The twenties, A.i. The mother of it all: Alexa and Siri communicate with us using close to natural language, guess our needs and provide without asking. Programs can already create perfect photo realistic pictures or music on command.

Machines will create. A picture? Why not an entire movie… Jobs will be automated to an incredible extent (City Journal Kay S. Hymowitz – title borrowing), robots, shopping without cashiers (Amazon check!).

A globalized mind made of personal memories, good and bad mixed, analysed and used. Do Android Phones Dream of Electric Sheep?

Distributed and self aware.

Serverless, micro services… Will programs be able to improve themselves? Yes. Twenties? Thirties maybe? We will witness that. A new form of life (Life 3.0 – Max Tengmark) to appear maybe…

If A.I. fullfills its promises, it will surpass our capacity to evolve maybe even help us to do so. It will not be a matter of “if or how” we can control it: but who will. It could be the Mother of all Destructions in the wrong hands.

So close, this will be upon us so fast, we have tremendous challenges on our path (not to mention a global warming issue).

This is not a technology our evolution matter, “can machines replace us on this planet (aaah)?”.  This is not sci-fi we are talking about: IT is a political matter now, internationally.

Don’t you know our personal information are for sale, hence our lives too?

People Security and Awareness has to be the new Disruption.

And yes, IT can help for this too: Let us be smart, safe and disruptable.