The Future! Well, sort-of.

By Peter Mosley

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As far back as I can remember folks like Don Norman have been predicting non-appliance based ubiquitous interface design. The future as seen in the above video.

Basically everything becomes Net-ready. It will happen absolutely.

But lets take a look at the future, from the past.

First car patent was in the mid 19th century. Patents involving the automobile in 1899 were over 600,000 in number. That's only 35 years after the Civil War!

First decent car … best guess?  I say late 70s early 80s? Prior to that they were rust buckets, unsafe and horrible to drive. Even the uber-cars in the 60s and 70s – Mercedes, Porsche & Jags were death traps. I had a couple of Volvos in the 60s and 70s, safer, but basically engineering boxes on wheels – first decent Volvo was like 1982. Now we have what I would call cars. Even the cheap ones are way better equipped than the luxury carsof 40 years ago

It took 120 years to get from the inventor's bench to a decent car?

The technology for this future world is sort-of here and now. Tablets, flash, ibooks, wireless etc etc. The technology will advance, but this will – even given exponential allowances – take about 50 years for us to see this in every home.

Net was invented in 1951.

Net adopted, sort-of, by consumers (ability to have database and content management and Blogs thereby taking it out of the hands of geeks into the hands of the general public) – 1999.

Net made mainstream – well, sort-of, currently … but still not on the level of the installed base of TV or radio or the telephone, for that matter – as in every home has at least one. And, not every company is selling online.

And the proof is, we are still talking about this technology and not simply using this technology. We pick up a phone and talk to someone, we do not marvel at the swithces,towers and relays – Telephone invented early 1800s:

That is a 200 year lag? I will be kind and say we will see the future as demonstrated in the video in 2050.

It takes time to enact change.