2040 - What will be new ?

A few weeks ago when I was in Vegas, an Australian gentleman came to our table and wanted to know more about our product CyberGlass. My pitch was that it would help reduce the number of engineers required to manage clients by 2x initially and by 10x in around 3 years. His first reaction was, "That's impossible". He went on to explain that 80% of the work that the techs did was not technical, but guiding and correcting users and hence advanced technology would not help. While this was true, we had actually taken this into consideration.

 
And my point to him was that human error was due to non-intuitive and poor design and not due to any lack of ability in the human users. And over time, adjusting human expectations as well as modifying the interfaces would achieve the improved efficiencies.

And this took us into yet another extremely interesting discussion. What can we expect in the next 20 or 30 years. And we stumbled upon an amazing fact, Less than 3 decades ago, which of us would have imagined that more than 50% of the world's population would be holding a small piece of equipment more powerful than the most powerful computer which would be able to do almost anything we could dream of. From making voice-calls to video-calls to chatting to ordering goods and services to browsing the Internet to taking on-line courses to listening music to watching movies to ...

And the realization of this was, a decade is a long time. And just as none of us could ever have imagined the smart phone the only thing I'm certain of is that I have no idea of what will happen. However, it seems like someone actually has an idea of what 2040 will be like.

I have a feeling that whatever our most aggressive expectation is, it will be beaten. And all of us will be pleasantly surprised.

This conversation also let me to have a look at the impact smartphones have had on our lives. And as expected, several articles and papers on the subject had been written. Here are 3 that I liked.

How Smartphones Revolutionized Society in Less than a Decade  
http://www.govtech.com/products/How-Smartphones-Revolutionized-Society-in-Less-than-a-Decade.html

The impact of smartphones and mobile devices on human health and life
By Leonid Miakotko
https://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/waoe/miakotkol.pdf

Impact of Smartphone's on Society
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236669025_Impact_of_Smartphone's_on_Society

However the most interesting article on the subject was contrarian.

12 ways your smartphone is making your life worse
https://www.businessinsider.com/12-ways-your-smartphone-is-making-your-life-worse-2018-6