The Future

I just came across an article by Marina Gorbis and BoingBoing's David Pescovitz entitled "Bursting Tech Bubbles Before They Balloon". From the perspective of a librarian and science fiction fan, this is a very interesting article:

The survey was conducted earlier this year to learn what developments IEEE Fellows expect in science and technology in the next 10 to 50 years. They ought to foresee such things better than most, because they have so much to do with bringing them about.

Of course, it's notoriously difficult to predict the future--I'm still waiting for my robot butler--but insofar as the IEEE Fellows forecast trends not specific occurrences, it seems to me that their predictions might have some validity.

They identify five themes which they feel will drive change over the coming decades:

"Computation and Bandwidth to Burn" involves the shift of computing power and network connectivity from scarcity to utter abundance; "Sensory Transformation" hints at what happens when, as Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, puts it, "things start to think"; "Lightweight Infrastructure" is precisely the opposite of the railways, fiber-optic networks, centralized power distribution, and other massively expensive and complicated projects of the 20th century; "Small World" is what happens when nanotechnology starts to get real and is integrated with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and biosystems; and finally, "Extending Biology" is what results when a broad array of technologies, from genetic engineering to bioinformatics, are applied to create new life forms and reshape existing ones.

Unfortunately, they seem to feel that Moore's Law will eventually succumb to the inevitability of physics, so if they're right we'll have to content ourselves to reading about Charles Stross' or Ken McLeod's vision of the singularity, not experiencing it, but an abundance of bandwidth and distributed networks will doubtless cause massive change, especially for those of us in the information business.

I know the end of the book has been touted for some time now, and while I am sure the book will persist, just as the manuscript did in the wake of Gutenberg, it seems clear that there will be an abundance of information available electronically, and thanks to ever widening networks, this information will be increasingly available. I believe that almost all librarians see the initial effects of this daily: people have come to expect information quickly and consider tasks like looking up an entry in an encyclopedia or placing an interlibrary loan request the be the height of drudgery. Perhaps I'm overstating things, but like it or not we're increasingly seeing a migration of information into an electronic medium. DRM or no, the printed word is no longer seen as the path of least resistance to information, even if this is in fact not yet the case.

This begs the question, how as librarians do we remain relevant. My answer: judicially embrace change. It would be a move of unparalleled foolishness to throw away our books and journals, but at the same time we must move forward and provide access to information in a digital medium--and we must do so in a way that that is accessible to the end user. Databases and digital collections are a good start, but it seems to me there's work to be done to enable things like more transparent authentication and less invasive DRM. And there's my personal wish: please, make it that all libraries offer free fast wireless connections.