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Ian Pearson - Twenty Four Seven Connected
Futurist Ian Pearson talks in Ericsson 2020 Shaping Ideas about how new technologies, such as devices that talk to each other, artificial intelligence that tells us what to do and high-speed connections available in any place at any time, will make our lives easier in 2020. But as we solve old problems, we create new ones.
Extract from Ian Pearson on Twenty Four Seven Connected
Ian Pearson: Ian Pearson
Ian Pearson: People are always very skeptical about the future, they never believe that one day it comes. It just happens very gradually and people don't notice it. They look back and think - the way I was living ten years ago is completely different. They never notice it happening, but the change is there. You take electricity for granted today. You're expecting when you switch a kettle or a radio on - it will work. If it doesn't it's not just slightly inconvenient you think of it as a major fault. Electricity has gone down. You'll think about the network the same way in the future. You will take it for granted that when you're on a train that there's no areas where there is no signal. You will assume that you got a first class signal everywhere you go by 2020. Lots of the devices that we carry around with us in 2020 will actually give us the connectivity. Even if your network isn't very good locally the devices will talk to each other and they will make their own network so you can get through to the next area where you've got really high speed fiber connection or something. We call that sponge network - sponge routing. Ian Pearson honestly wouldn't want to say in the future that our lives are going to be better than today but they'll be different. A lot of the things that we're worried about today will have solved but we will also create some new problems. I would say that when we get rid of the connectivity problems you really get access to the internet and all of that sort of stuff everywhere you go. You'll be able to find out where you're going to get lots of AI in the background telling you what you're meant to do. But we'll find out all sorts of ways of screwing it all up by inventing all sorts of new services that allow your boss to keep tabs on you, your company will expect more from you. It'll expect you to behave when you're outside of work. We'll create lots of new social problems that will balance out those things that we're solving. Ian Pearson thinks that the key drivers of all of this are really what people want to do as people. The technology is progressing. It's not the technology driving it though. What the technology is doing is allowing us to do stuff we've always wanted to do but we couldn't and now we can because the technology is letting us do these things.
Ian Pearson: Ian Pearson