By Risto Linturi:

When 20 years ago my ideas first appeared on these pages, I was not a professional futurist. I was an executive catalyst trying to push broadband communication services forward. 

I created visions of the future, giving talks around the world on the glorious digital future of shared virtual reality, mobile computing, and pervasive networks. I also led numerous experiments and had access to a high number of researchers and experts to advise me on technology details. Now all those visions have become part of our daily lives or are just entering the market in some form or other.

It has become difficult to remember how we actually used technology 20 years ago. All new gadgets, smart phone apps – they work like the dreams of late 1990’s. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have contributed greatly in creating convenient integrating platforms for the huge variety of things which now can be controlled with smart phones. This is however only the beginning of the transforming impact of both long- and short-range wireless technologies. I share few glimpses of the wireless future in later paragraphs. 

The speed of evolution

I will first briefly describe the results of my past seven years of work, which has been participated actively by hundreds of specialists in all fields and published by the Parliament of Finland. The results show clearly the extremely fast technological revolution we are facing. This will challenge our whole society. The way we lead our daily lives will change, professions will change and societal structures too.

When we try to assess technological impact during the past 20 years, the core is not in simple things like our capability to read news from our mobile phone, navigate the streets of virtual Helsinki or look at the insides of our smart fridges with our smartphones while shopping. My early visionary work operated mainly on the superficial level. The major changes concern i.e. disruption of media, banking, trading, and retreat of democracy in the form of disregard of facts, but also industries forming clusters around certain compatibility standards like Bluetooth, Android or the Internet protocols. These major changes are enabled by the foreseen technological developments, but their impact to the way we organize our societies and industries goes well beyond technology itself. As we see how different the approaches are in USA, Europe, China, and Russia, we must realize technology by itself does not determine our future.

As a systematic effort to assess potential technological impacts in the future, my project divided the society into 20 value producing networks. Each of them has a prime goal. Passenger transport, Logistics, Sustenance, Energy supply and Health care are easy examples. Some value producing networks are more abstract like Power structures, Remote impact, Human work or Existential meaning. Altogether the 20 cover almost all organized functions within our societies and each of them has a clear prime goal and several moderating values. The prime goal as an example for passenger transport is clearly to move people from one place to another and main moderating values are safety, cost, convenience, and reliability. Each of the 20 follow their set patterns now and our major finding is that they are all challenged in fundamental ways.

Let us continue with passenger transport. Privately owned cars define the dominant logic presently. Major infrastructure, knowledge and vehicle investment is concentrated on cars. When driverless cars become common, an electric robot taxi can be cheaper and more reliable than private car. If we get fleets of robot taxi’s, the need for car dealers, gasoline stations, and parking places diminishes. The use of mass transit in major routes becomes simpler. This affects urban planning greatly. Stores, event centers, service bureaus or residential areas need no parking places, but the entry and exit must be fluent. Robotized logistics has as great implications to commerce but also to living in rural areas. These cars naturally interact wirelessly with their environment and their passengers or packages.

Possibly the most astonishing potential change we recognized concerned sustenance. Using LED-lights and fermentation, one can produce the necessary foodstuff daily and locally even in urban neighborhood. We already converse with our smart gardens wirelessly, but smart gardens are in their infancy yet. The production process can be handled with robots and food prepared individually for each person by a robot chef, transported with mobile robots. It contains no preservatives, it is truly fresh, all allergies and taste preferences are accounted for. We would not need farms, food industry, food distributors, or groceries. In case you wish to ensure the food is healthy, you scan it with multispectral imaging appliance wirelessly connected to your smart phone or some wearable.

Technology is now advancing more rapidly than ever before. We can read pictures and words from brains including dreams; chemical substances can be recognized remotely, or DNA analyzed by mobile phone accessories. My current laptop is 100 billion times faster than my first computer. Computing speeds have increased to enable realistic virtual worlds and already contemporary neural networks enable robots performing versatile expert tasks. On the other hand, Elon Musk has applied permission to send 42.000 communications satellites to low Earth orbit providing broadband capability all over the world. All technology will be available to every nation across the globe. Energy technology is in transit to create cheap renewable energy for us all, cheap and light batteries and solar fuels will serve for the nights and long dark winters for people living up north. Materials technology provides us strange new materials like transparent aluminum, transparent insulators, tougher than steel biomaterials and other wonders.