CHICAGO — If you’re the type of person who doesn’t like change, you’re really out of luck. The world of contracting will be changed by technology at a stunning rate, futurist Michael Rogers told contractors who are members of the Nexstar Network meeting here.
Rogers bills himself as the Practical Futurist because he looks no more than five to 10 years into the future. A lot of the technology that he talks about exists, or is in the planning stages, or the pieces are all there and one just has to connect the dots to show how they’ll all work together. Being a “practical futurist,” Rogers joked, gets him away from questions about flying cars.
If you look at a five to eight year time frame, he told the contractors, think back to just eight years ago. The iPhone had not been introduced. The entire product category of smart phones did not exist. YouTube had just started and most tech writers predicted that it wouldn’t last because it was being sued for copyright infringement by all of the movie studios and TV networks. Only 50,000 people were on Facebook and they were all on a few university campuses. A 32-in. flat screen TV cost $3,200. If change continues at the same pace, Rogers predicted, an iPhone in 2022 will have the computing power of one of today’s servers.
In his youth, Rogers was a tech geek who went to college in Silicon Valley. He also wrote a lot of science fiction stories, so when he graduated, he had two job offers — one from Intel and one from Rolling Stone. Rock and roll was very good to him, he said, at least as much as he can remember. That led to a career as a technology writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and he has made frequent appearances on TV news shows.
Rogers invoked Metcalfe’s Law (Robert Metcalfe is the inventor of Ethernet) that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of people connected to it. We will always be connected to the Internet, he said, because of all of the connected objects with which we interact. It’s the Internet Of Things, and there will be more and more of those Things.
We’ll see more wearable computers such as Google Glass, which Rogers predicted would become handy instead of clunky and dorky like they are now. Rogers said that Apple should come out with a similar product that it can call iGlasses, which made all of the contractors in the room groan at the pun.
Rogers has tried out Google Glass. He said they project all of their information in front of you and down, what Rogers called “bifocal level.” GE is using them, Rogers reported, to provide information to their jet engine mechanics. A version is in the works for emergency room doctors. More and more people will wear heads-up goggles, Rogers said, and for today’s 10-year-olds it will not be a big deal.
Imagine outfitting all of your service technicians with service information on every piece of equipment they will encounter. Imagine walking onto a job site, saying, “BIM drawings,” and they are projected in front of you. You will be connected to screens everywhere.
We are moving into a time of high-speed wireless broadband everywhere, Rogers said. He said that Steve Jobs predicted that we will have broadband-connected flexible tablets with learning capabilities that will talk to you in an almost sentient manner.
We will see more robots and artificial intelligence. IBM’s Watson is moving beyond playing chess or winning Jeopardy! It is now studying law and medicine and will soon be available for second opinions. IBM is investing $1 billion in Watson, Rogers noted.
Watson is studying law because a lot of the grunt work has been outsourced to India. The “discovery” process is sorting through reams of documents to uncover evidence. Watson can do this.
So what does all this mean for contractors? Smart sensors everywhere. That’s why Google bought Nest. Self-powered smart sensors will all be connected to each other and to the ‘net. We will see smart buildings that know how many people are in them and, by reading their badges, know who they are. The network will tap into everybody’s calendar and know, for example, that a dozen people are going to be in the main conference room at 10:00 AM and turn on the lights and HVAC accordingly.
Water conservation is not yet in the same place as energy conservation, he noted, although water rates have doubled and even tripled in some places over the last 13 years. Hansgrohe is researching gray water recycling appliances, he noted. Regarding appliances, many Japanese manufacturers are building in capacity to connect with wireless networks.
And your vehicles will become smarter, talking to both each other and to the highway. Vehicles talking to each other can avoid collisions. Sensors built into a bridge, for example, can detect icing and communicate that to vehicles.