The Future of Technology

When it comes to future trends in technology, I have more than once been wrong. Very wrong. As a result, I've learned to never trust my own instinct when I hear about how technology is going to be in the future. I apparently can't see that far ahead.

I remember the first time I ever made such a mistake. It was in the fall of 1984, and I was taking a semester long computer programming course at my high school. Even way back then computers were something that interested me very much (Computers and the piano. I think anything that allowed my nervous fingers to move and create things.). During the last three weeks of the course, though, we moved away from computer programming, and I remember my instructor saying to us, "For the rest of the class we're going to work--not on computer programming--but on something called 'computer applications.' You see," he went on, "in the future, most people are NOT going to write their own programs. Other people will write the programs for them, and they'll just USE those programs written by someone else."

I didn't get it. Why would a person let someone else write a program for them? What was the fun in that? I understood it even less when we started working on a word processing program a few moments after that. I HATED the word processing program. I had been trained to type on a typewriter. I couldn't handle the idea that I didn't need to listen for the DING anymore to return the carriage to the left of the paper. I was sure I'd never get used to a word processing program, and even more sure that I wouldn't use a bunch of programs written by other people.

Utter nonsense, of course. I'm writing this blog entry on a word processing program of sorts, and I got used to the idea of not hitting the "Return" key long ago. And I haven't written a computer program since I left that class in 1984. The closest I've ever come to writing in computer code is writing in HTML and javascript on web pages. In 1984, though, I just couldn't see the future.

The same thing happened about 10 years ago when I read in a news magazine that the next big thing in computing was going to be Internet-based programs. "Cloud" programs they were called, because the software wasn't something you could physically touch or hold, wasn't on a CD or a floppy disk. Instead, consumers would pay a monthly or yearly fee to use this Internet-based service.

What a load of baloney, I remember thinking. Why would someone pay an ongoing fee to rent a program that runs over the Internet--which, mind you, was a pretty unreliable beast back in the year 2000--when they could purchase software on a CD and install it on their computers themselves? When you bought software you actually GOT something. When you purchased a cloud license you got...what? Nothing you could hold. It would NEVER catch on.

I know better now. At home, my email is entirely web based (Gmail), and I do my taxes and banking using online tools. At work, nearly every major system is now a cloud-based system, including our district email, student information system, and (coming in the next couple of weeks) our financial management / human resources system.

So don't ever ask me about the future trends of technology. I have no idea. I've learned to just trust the people who seem to know. 1 to 1 student computing using students' own devices that they bring to school? If you say so. Tablet PC's that are powerful and under $200 in price? You must know something I don't!