The next big thing
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How easy is it to predict where tech will take us in the next decade, and have we hit a plateau in the pace of innovation?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to author and artist Douglas Coupland, who retells how a mind-bending run-in with a Google research team left him convinced that the next huge development hurtling towards us like a meteor is what he calls "talking with yourself".
Science fiction predictions of the future are notoriously wayward - where are the hoverboards and ubiquitous fax machines promised by the Back to the Future films? Nonetheless, forecasting tech developments can be 85% accurate over a 10-year time horizon, according to professional futurologist Dr I D Pearson.
But while tech may continue to take us to new and strange places in the long term, has Silicon Valley run out of earth-shattering new products, at least in the short term? The BBC's Zoe Kleinman reports from a rather subdued CES 2020 tech conference in Las Vegas.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Cracked egg containing computer circuitry; Credit: sqback/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC coming up, forecasting the future of tech. |
| 0:09.2 | It was really drug-like. It was like, oh my, what's going on in my head? And it was like the closest you can be to dreaming while still awake. |
| 0:17.3 | It's the next big thing, but you wouldn't have found it at the world's biggest tech fair. |
| 0:22.2 | I've been coming to CES for several years now, and every year there's one big thing. And this year, |
| 0:26.9 | there really hasn't been the big headline. And there's a sense that we've sort of reached a plateau. |
| 0:33.1 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:39.0 | There are some people who make their living predicting the future, |
| 0:42.8 | and no, they're not fortune tellers gazing into crystal balls at fairs. |
| 0:47.2 | Companies employ them. They're called futurologists. |
| 0:50.2 | Because in business, everyone wants to know what the next big thing is, |
| 0:54.0 | the tech that's going to change the way we live. |
| 0:57.1 | Given it's a new decade, it struck us here on Business Daily as a good moment to look ahead to what the next 10 years might bring. |
| 1:03.9 | We'll speak to a professional futurologist in just a moment. |
| 1:07.2 | But first, the author and artist Douglas Copeland. |
| 1:10.0 | He wrote the 1991 bestseller, Generation X, |
| 1:13.9 | Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was a book that gave a generation its name and popularised |
| 1:19.3 | terms such as McJobb, the term many used to describe work in the gig economy. And he has some, shall we say, |
| 1:26.6 | experience of what the future of tech might involve. |
| 1:30.1 | We all know that there's something new hurtling towards us like a meteor and we can't stop it. |
| 1:37.6 | And what's frustrating is that we don't actually know what it's going to be, but it will be something. |
| 1:42.9 | And it's not like Bill Gates |
| 1:44.4 | or all these rich people know. Whatever the next big thing is, it is going to surprise everybody, |
... |
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