MisEntropy

The future of: news reporting?

Sometime in the near future, Wikipedia will absorb and back up all the information in the world even as it’s being created. It’s already doing a good job of it – and it’ll only get better.

And when that happens, we will be able to follow the latest news by simply subscribing to the ‘Recent changes’ page of Wikipedia - which will hopefully come with RSS feeds, and tags to help us find the stream(s) we are interested in.

Encyclopaedias will then stop being the long-term by-products of the gathering, analysing and reporting of news. Instead, news will become the by-product of creating an encyclopaedia.

Which, probably, is the way it should be.

The future of: futurism

In his last column for WIRED magazine, prognosticator Bruce Sterling takes on futurism itself. After tackling the directions the Internet is going to take us - more individualism, less institutionalism, low cost connectivity, ubiquitous creativity, collaboration and a blurring of where reality ends and virtuality begins - Bruce hones in squarely on futurism.

Though he starts off saying that futurism has no future, what he surely must mean is exactly the opposite. He points out, rightly, that prognostication is no longer the preserve of the elite and anyone with a Typepad account (his example, not mine) has a license to hold forth on the future. Surely this democratisation of expertise only means a blooming of creativity, collaboration and delivery - as has already happened in other fields (and everytime there has a democratisation movement in history).

In my opinion, there will also be a bigger fallout of this transfer of the wand from the pundit to the garden-variety blogger - there will be a explosion in the width and variety of predictions, a kind of explosion never seen before. The bell-curve of predictions which Bruce refers to (in the context of the Pew Future Of The Internet II study) will remain but the volume it harbors will increase manifold as will the elongation of its tails on either side.

This newly empowered collective of prognosticators is a powerful engine that can process a far greater amount of information about the future than has been possible before. The sheer number of people thinking about the future only means that a wider variety of possibilities - from the crazy to the crazily conservative - can be considered, imagined, fleshed out and championed. And the collective's processing power will only increase exponentially as more join the fold.

However improbable, or impossible, a particular version of the future is, you can bet your last penny that there's someone out there imagining it - and preparing to champion it - right now.

The result will be the unlikelihood of encountering surprise - pleasant or unpleasant - at least for a lucky few (not necessarily the same few all the time.) Bruce begins his column by saying that "The Internet has a habit of defying expectations." The same could have been said of the future until now - but I believe beginning now the future's ability to pull a rabbit out of its habit will progressively vanish.

Whatever happens in the future, there's going to be some blogger out there logging into his blogging account to say, "Told you so."

(Read more posts from "The Future Of:" series.)

The future of : the music album

WIRED 14.09 carries a feature and an interview with Jeff Beck about where the music album is headed.

It is clear that the future of the music album is not as a standard 13-track collection of songs. In WIRED's words, the album will become "a long shelf of songs and products, each carrying its own release date, distribution path, and price tag."

But the album exists as an entity because it was the only feasible (and profitable) way for record companies to distribute songs. Now that there are other ways and means for songs to reach their listeners, the album as we know is headed for premature retirement.

However, the term 'album' will be more die-hard. While music companies - and Jeff Beck - are re-imagining and experimenting with the various forms it can take, one should note that in the new paradigm it is the listeners who will decide what an album will be - where it begins, where it ends and what it contains.

In my view, the album will become a specialised music term for 'tags.'  Each album name will become a tag word that a listener will choose for a playlist - in most cases it will not even be the name given by the artist/music publisher. In almost all cases, the playlist will span various artists and at least a few genres. Needless to say, albums will range from a handful of songs to the hundreds or even thousands.

Music lovers will be able to share their 'albums' with others via the equivalent of online sites like del.icio.us or flickr - and make new connections or discover new music under their favourite album names.

A lot of this is already happening - I am merely suggesting it is tied to the fate of the term 'album'.

(Read more posts from "The Future Of:" series.)

The future of : reading

There are very few things I'd rather be doing than curling up with a nice book (preferably a non-fiction one.) But as pleasurable as I find the habit, I have to admit that reading as we know it has a bleak future.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the probable future of reading ever since I read Michael Rogers' latest Practical Futurist column (also the subject of my last post.) I agree with everything he writes about in the piece except that it'll probably happen much sooner than 2025.

Why does it look all too likely that long-form reading has a not too distant expiry date? Because it's already happening. In fact, as Michael argues, long-form reading is an artificial construct. And to cultivate and retain this 'artificial' habit, we have had to invent the myth of the virtues of reading.

It's plainly obvious to most of us that long-form reading is not an indispensable skill. There are a disconcertingly large number of people who get on with life - and are even very successful - without having read a single book.

The other development running concurrent with our growing realistation of this truth is the insistence of the Book Brigade as to the indispensability of reading. I think it's a sign of an impending defeat, that makes their cries get louder and more insistent - while in reality, they only end seeming up more and more out of sync.

So, does that mean that we (and the generations to come) will stop learning anything new? Of course not. It only means that knowledge will no longer be the prerogative of books and will increasingly be found in other places than just between the covers of a book. And simultaneously this knowledge will be broken down into more meaningful bits - and one will absorb information continuously rather than be drip-fed at regular intervals with books.

In fact, I think it's a paradox that future generations will spend less time reading long-form literature but will be more intelligent and knowledgeable than us. This will be possible largely due to the multimedia rich home and work environment we'll build in the future. Additionally, the very  environment around us will be information-rich, virtually eliminating any need for an artificial habit like long-form reading.

But there are several artificial habits we pursue for pleasure. And needless to say lots of people - including me - will continue to read for pleasure. But can we afford to have a smarter-than-thou attitude because of it? Perish that thought.

(Read more in "The Future Of:" series.)

The future of : highways

Wired 14.09 carries a short-feature where they asked a few experts 'what will highways be like in 2026?'

Most of the answers run the gamut of the expected - autonomous lanes, getting more capacity out of current systems and even personal aircraft. And I do agree that these are likely to happen - especially in 20 years time.

But I wonder about the other simpler but lasting changes that are more likely to happen than not.

The issue of raising capacity along with decreasing congestion and accidents comes up quite a bit when we talk of highways in the future. And one of the ways to do it is to imagine a horizontal escalator that people hop onto and out of at designated stops. The escalator has a fixed bandwidth and consumes a certain amount of power but the advantage is that there will be practically no congestion or accident related delays.

Of course, building such escalators to replace our highways will probably take eternity. But the same principle is more likely to be put to use in micro dosages. For eg. imagine a trailer truck that's carrying half-a-dozen cars. It's a far cry from the mass transit escalator we imagined but in moving as a unit, it is doing its tiny bit to address some of the problems we currently face on our highways.

Now imagine 100 trucks carrying 6 cars each. That's 100 units of traffic replacing 600 units. And cutting down exponentially the potential for traffic snarl-ups.

These ferry trucks will build the escalator highways of the future, bottom-up. Cars will be able to hop on and off at predestined stops - from where they will move on on their own steam.

There are two other trends that point to such a future. One is the increased environmental awareness and conscientiousness. The equation of 100 units moving at a constant pace as against 600 individual units huffing and puffing all on their own loads the equation in favour of the former.

And secondly, while we wait for hydrogen/fuel-celled powered cars with a wide range, we're likely to settle for electric cars designed for city/short-distance driving . These cars in combination with the truck ferries will give both reach and last mile drivability.

I do admit that the idea isn't original - ferry boats and trains have been doing it for ages. But I believe that the system will be imported to road highways and revolutionise our own understanding of highways. Highways will go from being passive patches of asphalt to dynamic systems that "ferry" your transport systems to your desired location faster, cheaper and while you catch a nap.

This "new" technology has one final advantage on its side. It's plug-and-playability with the existing infrastructure. We can start now.