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4 June 2004
Killer App
I attended one of those futurist conferences yesterday. The National Intelligence Council was tasked to come up with a picture of what the world might look like in the year 2020, sixteen market years from now.
They are looking at three broad scenarios. In the first, a sort of Pax Americana prevails, which leads to a series of bilateral regional accords to accommodate regional powers, and serves to dampen unilateralism. The second recognizes the brain-drain which is beginning in the technical trades, bright foreign students returning home after education rather than staying in the States, or not coming here at all because of the backlash to the War on Terror, which is sometimes perceived as a war on foreigners.
In this second scenario, a Davos sort of international order including a unified Europe, with a rising China and India as major global players as America adjusts to a more cooperative economic structure.
The third possibility includes the wild card of climatic change-say, a couple more scorching summers on the Continent that drives Europe and Japan further Green as the U.S. defends its economy by continuing to burn the energy it possesses domestically-high sulfur-and the global economy spirals out of control. NATO would die in this scenario.
I don't know about the three paths, but the Ambassador who crafted them has been all over the world talking to people seems enamored of them as placeholders for the unknowable.
The National Security Agency offered to sponsor a conference at the Marriott Inner-Harbor in Baltimore, a charming old brick city now clustered around its football and baseball stadia.
NSA employed the Toffler Group-the Future Shock people-to pull together a hundred learned people from the commercial and R&D side to sample the possibilities of how the march of technology might affect each future.
I had a chance to represent the Phone Company and our Labs, who are busily inventing some of the nanotechnology and micro-machines that are coming to the marketplace of 2020. We had some great conversations. My first panel was able information security, and the thrust of the group was that the concept of "trust," or what you are willing to share on a web that can steal your identity quick as a whistle, monitor your activities, financial and otherwise, your preferences, your friends and your politics.
The ability to wander cashless through the world, free and secure is the ostensible goal. But of course, there are those things we do not consider anyone's business but our own, To entrust the State with our secrets, or to determine level of cooperation with others, is the conundrum. Of course, the credit people at Equifax knows more about us than NSA and we don't seem to care.
But Equifax hasn't blown up any buildings lately and is not known for their desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, unless you count a bad credit rating in that category. So how we winnow the landslide of data to find terrorists while protecting our privacy-no make that our privacy and the democracy-was the key to the discussion.
We do business with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA, the guys who created a thing called ARPAnet, which turned into the Internet, a gift of DoD to an unsuspecting world). They funded Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project (TIA) which was a prototype for linking all the databases together to identify suspicious activity that could be precursors to terrorist activity.
Or just a trip to Cancun. That was the problem with it. Which is not to say there wasn't an up side. We were looking at a subset of that to identify what was being sold in drugstores and absentee rates at schools, names stripped off, as a means to determine if people were self-medicating in advance of showing up at the Emergency Room in the event of a bio or chem attack that we might not notice until after it happened, and the sick began to appear.
Hours could count, big time, in the response.
I told our distinguished table of experts that the technology was fine, but after the next attack we stood the real chance of losing our privacy and maybe the democracy to a police state run by our Hosts and those clowns at the FBI if we were not ready, and I saw no indications we were getting ready for the consequences of a future that is not sixteen years away but maybe tomorrow.
Thankfully, we had a commercial guy at the table. He was talking about the Killer App, the hardware/software like Gameboy that would change the landscape, and become something that everyone would have to have and would make its creators an ocean of money. The Killer App is the holy Grail that all the geeks are looking for.
He had a denim shirt with his corporate logo and jeans and bushy hair and a gravely voice. He put the future in perspective. He said all advances in technology had been driven by the desire of geeks to look at salacious pictures. That is what had driven the increase in bandwidth on the 'net, and streaming video and all the other things that we enjoy on our high-speed modems.
He said what was coming next was body suits that will hook up to the computer and provide sensory inputs to the human that will make any sort of sex with anyone possible on demand. The people at the table blushed when he said that one of the big things coming were chip implants to enhance performance and the intensity of the Big O.
Even he was surprised to hear that there is a surgical procedure today to do the same thing. One of the women at the table, clearly discomfited by the discussion, said that the application for a body suit she was looking for would teach her ballroom dancing. The guy with the bushy hair said that was fine, and in fact the suit could respond to a variety of software programs-his point was that sex was what was driving the commercial technology.
The woman sniffed and said she would have a different suit for that.
Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra
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