“So 2035!”: What digital technology has in store for us in 20 years

As digital technology evolved, it was full of promises for the future. In your view, which of these have been kept over the last 20 years? And which have been broken?

Nicolas Demassieux [Senior VP Orange Labs Research]: “For me, I think that the two most significant promises that have been kept are connectivity and access to information. In just 20 years, we have gone from the very first phone to more than 5 billion people owning one. This connectivity is now almost universal, and it gives us immediate access to a wide variety of information.”

Pierre-Noël Giraud [Member of Orange’s Scientific Council, economist, graduate of prestigious Paris engineering school the École des Mines, and founding member of French learning society the Académie des Technologies]: “This access to enormous amounts of information, and the reduction in transaction and communication costs, is a major factor in our personal and collective development. But we should also look at some of the broken promises, for example the limitations of artificial intelligence, which still does not lend itself very well to language, and to meaning in general. We still lack the tools to find our bearings and perform high-quality searches on the internet, despite the talk of semantic search engines 20 years ago.”

ND: “ It’s true that this is a far more complex area than was first thought, but great progress has been made in the last 3 or 4 years in terms of language recognition, speech recognition, understanding meaning, etc.”

These days, the Internet of Things and Big Data are making new promises. How will they transform the Internet over the next 20 years?

PNG: “The Internet of Things is unquestionably the most significant technical and organizational subject matter for the coming years. By 2035, all standard objects and all manufactured objects could contain microchips capable of storing information, making calculations and communicating with the Internet.”
ND: “This more widespread use of connected objects is going to change the Internet itself. At the moment, the internet is a huge brain packed full of information, but this information is extremely abstract. These sensors are going to increase its understanding of reality, of the physical world we live in. And that will offer us huge potential for applications, innovations and reductions in the cost of regulating our environment. By 2035, it will be possible to achieve this symbiosis between the digital and physical worlds.”
PNG: “The Internet of Things also raises the question of a more widespread use of robots. There is a network between these objects, sensors and actuators where information flows and is processed. Machines will become increasingly capable of processing and acting upon this information themselves. Even now, we can see that the form that these robots take is changing continually. They monitor, drive and alert huge communities, whole industries, even. The fear that robots will replace human beings is, therefore, resurfacing, although it should be noted that this has never actually happened yet. Human beings will always be needed to build them, monitor them and program them.”

And how will the way in which we interact with the Internet change?

ND: “The main feature of the first era of digital technology is the large-scale use of “explicit interfaces” to interact with the Internet: keyboards, screens, etc. Something else that will result from the Internet of Things is that in future, we won’t need to use keyboards any more, we will interact more implicitly. For example, your electronic butler will be able to help you without you lifting a finger. This is the era of ambient intelligence! Of course, explicit interaction with machines and between ourselves will always exist and evolve.”

Nowadays, in healthcare, NBIC tools are promising to make human beings almost immortal. Can technology, including digital technology, fulfill all our needs, even the most unrealistic of them?

    
ND: “There are numerous applications for technology and digital technology in healthcare. We have been able to perform remote surgery for some years now. And these days, certain laboratories are successfully conducting experiments to enable quadriplegic patients to operate exoskeletons by thought. Digital technology can also offer many opportunities in the field of prevention. But I don’t think that digital technology will provide the universal answer.”
PNG: “I think that the Internet, and the phenomena of concentration and polarization that it offers, is going to contribute to increasing inequality in the quest for health. However, digital technology must not only be used to address the “extreme” and hyper-connected needs of certain high-income, hi-tech populations. The reality of tomorrow’s world will be that Africa has 2.5 billion inhabitants and increasingly large cities, for example. Digital technology should be used to help all these people to work, get around and take care of themselves. This is a powerful direction for digital technology, and, incidentally, Orange is very much at the forefront of it, with its research focusing on the connected city and the digitalization of emerging countries.”

With the potential offered by Big Data on the one hand, and uberization on the other, digital technology seems to be both an opportunity and a threat to business. How is the economic landscape going to change?

PNG: “Today, the peer-to-peer trading economy is redefining boundaries and it will, I think, cause entire economic sectors to disappear and be replaced by others that are more capable of satisfying the needs of consumers. That has an impact on the very structure of corporations, which are becoming less hierarchical, more agile and increasingly decentralized, etc., with more varied forms of work.”

ND: “In all sectors, with the possible exception of heavy industry, a new type of competition could emerge where you would least expect it. What will make a difference in business is the corporations’ ability to gather information about their competitors and consumers and to use it to improve what they offer. This information is a real goldmine, as it means things that were still unimaginable a few years ago are now possible. For example, using predictive analytics, Amazon is now able to send books to certain areas without them even having been ordered.”
PNG: “And this new potential for action also applies to States and governments. If all objects contain a connected chip, they could, conceivably, contain information on the product’s manufacturing chain. And, for a State, that provides huge investigatory potential and an ability to control the circulation of goods or the movement of finances.”

And what does that change from the consumer’s perspective?

ND: “Currently, there is a risk of seeing a profound imbalance establish itself between consumers and organizations that know a great deal about them and that have considerable resources. Rather than being constantly bombarded by offers, tomorrow’s consumers should try to identify their actual needs and to reverse the relationship, by grouping together to get the best prices, for example, or even to negotiate prices. Our capacity to take action is now vastly increased: we all have a tool in our pockets that is 30 times more powerful than the most advanced computer was 30 years ago!”

* Survey “Les Français et le numérique (Digital technology and the French people)”, TNS Sofres, January 2014.

Find out more

• Pierre-Noël Giraud personal file on MINES ParisTech (in French)
• Follow Nicolas Demasieux on Twitter @ndemassieux
• Research blog