2020
Posted: December 17, 2006 Filed under: Futurism 1 Comment »Do you ever get the feeling that technology is just going through a bit of a growth spurt? Well you’ve seen nothing yet. This is just technology following the exponential growth curve it’s been on for millions of years.
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and author of “The Singularity is Near” a book which predicts the pace at which technology will exceed human abilities. There’s a great TEDBlog film of him talking on this subject. It is the most packed 15 minute presentation I’ve ever seen: http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/11/inventor_ray_ku.html. In it, he does an extremely technical de-construction of the past and future evolution of science. He explains why Moore’s law (or an adaption of it) - that computers will double in power every 18 months – will continue to hold true indefinitely; predicts we will completely reverse engineer the human brain by 2020, which is when computers will match human computing power. By 2029 (when my super cute and highly intelligent niece Zoe will have just turned 25!), we will be able to replace “underperforming” body parts (such as bloodcells) with artificial alternatives. I’ll need those body parts badly by then. I’ll be 55.
Get a coffee, your pipe and slippers and have a watch. It’s well worth it!
Shopping
Posted: December 17, 2006 Filed under: Economics, Futurism, marketing Comments OffIn my current job, we care alot how much time people are spending online. That’s becuase it tends to feed very directly into how much media our clients should buy that way. That’s a very old fashioned approach really – although it works (for forecasting trends at least). In presentations this is called “money follows eyeballs”.
Of course the reason that this is unsophisticated is partly that media, by its own admission, is somewhat blunt but mainly that it leads people into a bit of broken thinking. “I used to spend £40bn on TV advertising when that accounted for 40% of consumers’ media time, now it’s 20% internet, 20% TV so I’m sticking £20bn into online”. That would work fine if people *watched* the internet.
I’m not saying display advertising doesn’t work obviously, just that the web requires more sophisticated thinking. It’s a doing space.
So lets look at the real numbers that should move us: “In November, UK internet sales reached £3bn” (IMRG) that’s £4.57m an hour, and marks a 50% increase from one year ago. IMRG CEO James Roper sums it up beautifully, “Though no longer a suprise, growth of this magnitude is neverthessless breathtaking”. In the 7 years of the survey the total for the 10 week run-up to Christmas has grown from £0.5bbn to £7bn.
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