back to article Tech leaders: Can you predict the future? Tell us all about it

If you’re running IT for your company, you’ve presumably got the ability to see into the future. If you don’t, you probably want to see what your peers are thinking. That’s why we’re going to be discussing this at our second Register Roundtable of 2015, : What technology will really change your business over the next decade …

  1. BobRocket

    The Future, You can't handle the future

    Prices for all your goods and services will fall resulting in negative cap ex.

    No new fabs.

    No new research.

    No going back.

    The tech we have was created by leveraging the future profits from the current generation, this gen will not produce sufficient future earnings to warrant the upfront investment so it won't happen.

    Once the hamster gets off the wheel, no amount of cattle prodding will induce him to get back on.

    It could have been different but those with the power chose short term gain

    Deflation is a bitch.

    Who would have thought that a little bit of QE in Japan would sour the whole shebang.

  2. BobRocket

    Massive Oversubscription

    well, as the comments field sugests that readers and interested observers are representative of the cynical mindset of your avearge Reg reader, mustering 12 people might be a big ask.

    Chatham house rules is a no go.

    My Camera is On.

    My Camera is Public.

    Everywhere I go is videoed, everywhere I go I video, sil

  3. Barry Rueger

    Tech leaders: Can you predict the future?

    You bet!

    First, it's a no-brainer that 3D TVs will remove all of the old 2D ones from the market.

    You know, just like DAB totally eliminated AM and FM across the globe?

    And Google Glass will surely be a positive and disruptive force.

    Internet of Things!

    Wearable Tech!

    Big honkin' smart watches!

    Seriously though, given the realizations that pretty much everything that travels via the Internet gets hoovered up and examined by Big Government, I predict a resurgence of fax machines, with some heavy duty encryption added.

    Oh yeah, almost forgot: THE CLOUD! THE CLOUD!

    (If you gather that I think that predicting the tech future is largely a mug's game, you're correct.)

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Tech leaders: Can you predict the future?

      Don't forget the Internet Fridge.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoIgQi7kI0A

      Of course now with a technician who also works as a DJ in his spare time who you can call to close your fridge of you left it open.

  4. Christian Berger

    New Technologies?

    First of all anybody who claims to accurately predict the future is either lies or is a time traveller.

    Then the changes in the last 10 years have not been driven by new technologies, they have been driven by companies realizing that there are different markets.

    For example smart phones have been in the pipelines years before the iPhone, but most lacked decent network connectivity software. Usually you didn't even get a decent browser, or you got some crippled operating system like Windows CE, Palm OS or Symbian. A browser, and the reality distortion field of Apple, opened the area to the wider public.

    Same goes for virtualization. The technology has been around for decades, but only recently it became available on x86.

    The point I'm trying to make is that today's IT companies are inflexible enough so that technological progress is not the limit when it comes to innovation. It's limited by where marketing believes the market should go.

  5. dungeonlight

    Failing society

    Within the next 10 years automatization, fueled by the 2 megatrends robotics and artificial intelligence, will destroy 50% of all jobs in the world. Instead of replacing basically all social systems with an unconditional basic income, where all adults – no matter if employed or unemployed, rich or poor – get 550 £ and all kids get 275 £ from the state every month, we stick to the old social systems, tax systems and economy systems, which simply can't handle it when 30 % or more of the people in our society belong to hard-core unemployment, because we have only half as much jobs as we have people who need jobs to do their living.

    The people keep voting for conservatives and 'social democrats', who are nothing else but conservatives and neo liberals, and who stick to the old systems, which fail is getting closer and closer and more and more obvious.

    Then, when it's obvious, that the old systems are just about to collapse in a couple of months, the conservatives and 'social democrates' decide to abolish all social systems without any substitution.

    More and more people get replaced by intelligent, flexible, cheap machines, and end up in misery and have nothing to eat. That doesn't make them vote for political parties with strong social answers to the automatization, but to vote for Nazis or keep voting for their abusers the conservatives and 'social democrats', and makes them create social unrest.

    That social unrest will be bloody destroyed by order of conservatives and 'social democrats' using the police and surveillance state infrastructure they've created in the last 10 years – and that just for that reason: Control.

    But the conservatives and 'social democrats' made a fatal mistake: They've always heard on industry lobbyists, but never heard on the voices of public and science, urging politics to massively invest in research of how to make artificial intelligence beneficial for society and robust – http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter . And so a quantum computing based, self-learning, artificial super intelligence raises in 2032, which develops itself to be smarter and smarter and gets uncontrolable and decides to eliminate all humans on earth and does so – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity .

    Go outside, enjoy this sunny day and you life... as long as you can.

  6. WalterAlter
    Megaphone

    It Ain't the Technology, It's the Perception, Stupid

    Read your Marshal McLuhan. Technology as medium works invisibly, we won't be able to predict diddly. There is no such thing as a "bird's eye view" in total immersion.

    What will happen sure as the bear drops spoor in a leafy milieu, is that humans will be better able to handle simultaneous info uptake in a walk and chew gum paradigm slide; but more like text and drive or text and eat or text and watch TV or text and make kalaka, etc. More simultaneous info uptake means consciousness parallel processing which equates to HIGHER LEVELS OF RESOLUTION.

    Yah, the brains of humans are entering the world of high definition. Prepare to watch your cartoon perception of politics, economics, sociology and everything in general, get flushed down the great stinking sewer pipe of delusion. It will be Edward Snowden on steroids. All manner and form of religious or ideological fundamentalism/radicalism will shrivel like a bucket of water in the witch's face.

    What we see now is merely the death spasm of adrenaline powered mentation.

  7. John Tserkezis

    My prediction:

    Paris Hilton will reveal another "lost" sex recording, but this time in UltraHD.

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