Alright technology professionals of the world, you’ve ushered in incredible changes over the last two decades. Take a break and congratulate yourselves on the impact you’ve made on virtually every facet of the world we live in. But don’t take too long. You’ve still got a lot of work to do.
In a recent Telepresence session with press and analysts across Canada, Dave Evans, Cisco Systems’ chief futurist, said that while technology has ramped impressively over the last 20 years, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In fact, to Evans’ way of looking at it, we’re facing down a veritable avalanche of technology innovation over the near future.
“And as with a physical avalanche, it’s incredibly disruptive, and if you’re at the bottom of it, it’s the last thing you want to see,” Evans said. “But you’ve got a few choices: you can stay there and get crushed, get out of the way, or you can ride it to success.”
The soundness of the advice to attempt to ride an avalanche aside, Evans outlined some of the ramifications of the continued exponential increases in compute power, storage capacity, network bandwidth and data creation over the next 50 years.
“We are looking at a fundamental shift in how the species goes forward,” he said. “Fifty years from now, 90 per cent of everything we’ve ever known will have been discovered in those 50 years.”
Bigger, faster, better, more
