Wall Street Journal – Peering into the Future, Dimly

The Wall Street Journal ran a collection of think-pieces today on “Thinking About Tomorrow: How will technology change the way we shop, learn and entertain ourselves? How will it change the way we get news, protect our privacy, connect with friends? We look ahead 10 years, and imagine a whole different world.”

My take on the story, though, was “ho-hum.” Looking ahead 10 years should get the mind a little further than easily predictable stuff such as this: “Mobile devices will get smaller and more powerful, and will connect to the Internet through high-speed links. The result: People will be able to do anything on a hand-held that they can now do on a desktop computer. In fact, they’ll be able to do even more, as mobile gadgets increasingly come equipped with global-positioning-system gear that can track your every move. As you drive around, for instance, you might get reviews of nearby restaurants automatically delivered to a screen in your car — maybe even projected onto the windshield.”

Aside from the safety aspect of that type of projection, this scenario surely is only a year or so away – not 10.

Same with “Privacy will come under further strain as social-networking sites and blogs become more pervasive. People will post ever more details of their lives online — and let hosts of people know about them with automatic updates.” How quaint. And even more “way out on a limb – NOT” predictions such as, “GPS technology will also let people interact more easily with resources such as Google Inc.’s Google Earth and Microsoft Corp.’s Live Search Maps….The GPS in your phone might pinpoint your location automatically and let you access data about that location from a map site at the touch of a button.”

Ho-hum. As digitally aware as the WSJ is (btw, will they go all-free-content?), maybe a newspaper is not the place to find truly revolutionary (and therefore more accurate) predictions of our digital future.

[Neato! This is the first blog post I’ve composed, edited, and published entirely and directly within Microsoft Word 2007.  Push-button ease, thanks to XML. Maybe in 10 years I’ll be able to do it from my mobile device – oh wait, I’ve done that too.]

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