The business of future gazing

The future comes in many shapes and sizes. One minute it is giant leaps to the stars, the next it is a journey through inner space. From contacting life on other worlds to creating artificial life down here on Earth, any future is, in theory, possible. Big companies still employ futurologists to make radical predictions about the next few years.

It is the futurologist's job to map out a path for their employers, spotting business opportunities and risks, identifying social changes, and steering their company towards the best profits. Futurologist for ВТ, Ian Pearson says: "I've got a lot of experience of working in different aspects of engineering, so I've got a good feel of how fast the different areas are going. So if I'm tracking what people are starting to do research and development on today, by going to conferences and reading technical magazines and stuff, I've got a fair idea of what's likely to be around, and I can guess fairly accurately how long it's going to take before it comes. Of course it is much easier to explain why something did not work, than trying to predict what will work in the future."

Flying cars were another idea that still has not quite taken off yet. But even while laughing off the internet fridge and the flying car, today's futurists continue to make outlandish predictions. Technology journalist Tim Phillips says: "It's important to be able to say to people that you've got some idea coming down the road, and futurologists are a way of doing this. The problem is revolutionary, radical, big ideas very rarely come true. A gadget can become popular if people can bond with it. If you cannot rely on a revolution, the alternative is to take today's technology, continue to shrink it down, and find new ways in which it can infiltrate our everyday lives. But even the relatively small steps of predicting the next big thing are easy to get wrong.

The latest technology Timeline released by ВТ suggests hundreds of different inventions for the next few decades including: 2012: personal 'blаск boxes' record everything you do every day 2015: images beamed directly into your eyeballs 2017: first hotel in orbit 2020: artificial intelligence elected to parliament 2040: robots become mentally and physically superior to humans 2075 (at the earliest): time travel invented.

These predictions may sound far-fetched, but we have to bear in mind that they are really only suggestions. The futurologists are not trying to make them happen, they are just considering the implications of them happening. Many companies perhaps realise that they are short of really big ideas, and because we're all so focused on doing what it takes to get us to the end of the day, week, month, and even in management terms only to the end of the next quarter, sometimes they forget that they have got to be around in 10, 20 or 30 years time. After years of development, this possibility is finally coming true.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 866