Back to the Future

I will show my age now. I’m 34 and eight months. I went to university in 1998 and even though it was sunny Liverpool, it wasn’t quite the school of life. It was the school of discovering booze, Everton FC, going to Cream once and despising the sweat dripping off the ceiling, and learning how to live and cope on my own.

In 1998, I did not have a laptop, nor a mobile phone. I only just had a lycos email address thanks to my sister introducing the concept to us on our dial-up connection when she went to Sunderland Uni. I didn’t have a phone for a good year or so and even when I did have one, my friends and I never relied on it. You were where you were, when you said you would be.

If you’d have told me back then that dongles, smartphones, selfies and webcams were the future, I’d likely have chuckled. I’d only just gotten a debit card, never mind any of the other gadgets which were to come on the scene.

I was involved in a workshop this week about some of the technological things I work on now, and some of the things I will be working on in 2-5 years. It was effectively taking me back to 1998 and telling me how the next five years of technology were going to pan out. The most striking visual for me was an advert from a type of Dixons, Comet, Currys, Best Buy shop. The value of the products were in the thousands. Virtually every one of the items and functionality currently sits in a smartphone or tablet. That is insane.

So, what happens if we fast forward to 2019? Well, if you read the news, we’ll likely all be blown to smitherines. I’m a little more hopeful than that. I hope that it only affects the people and football teams I dislike (yes, I did insert poor tasteless joke there – a little pre-Premier League giddiness).

Think a selfie is new and hip? What will it be in a year or two? Meet the drone. Dronies are the way forward. A camera that essentially flies close to you following a GPS signal and films your every move. Just imagine, a kind of selfie where your head doesn’t appear gigantic, or your short arms are not half way in the pic.

Imagine going to your local supermarket. You connect to a wifi or P2P connection which essentially guides you through the store and throws offers at you midway through the shop. Remember the vouchers you used to collect in the newspaper, or would print from websites? They’ll be zapped to you mobile phone mid-shop. The Beacon world.

You know how supermarkets encourage you to sign up to their membership card and then you start receiving vouchers in the mail weeks and months after based on what you have been purchasing? That is not even half the story. GPS signals are being tracked from your phone as you wander around the store to track the route you walk in store. Tracking your movements, and how visual prompts such as offers on the end of an aisle are leading you in a certain direction. Forget match-fixing or Big Brother, there’s so much more that goes on or exists than you could even imagine.

Well it is the way of the world and you and I had better get used to it. Whether that may be technology, general culture, or people, our lives will be fundamentally different for better or worse in 5 years’ time, or 16 years’ time, than any of us can possibly imagine. By all means take a different route around Tesco, Sainsburys, Walmart or Sobeys just to confuse the geeks, but there’s nothing wrong with embracing technological advances neither. I’d have never have been to the places I have been, seen the things I have seen or done the things I have done without the beauty of a webcam, camera, phone, laptop etc.

See, even old folks like me can embrace technology!