WIRED sat down with HP’s chief technology officer, Shane Wall, to hear about the huge global trends that he thinks are going to shape the way we live, work and govern in the next 20-30 years.
“For hundreds of years we’ve been concentrating more and more in cities,” Wall says. In 1991 there were 10 cities with a population of 10 million people or more. By 2050 there will be 60, the vast majority of them in Asia. And cramming ourselves into ever more densely populated urban spaces will bring a whole new set of challenges, Wall says. “How we design products, how we deliver products, how we manage energy and waste – all of those are going to present opportunities for us.”
It’s not just how we live that is going to change, but how we move between our homes and other places, too. Driverless cars promise to ease congestion, making travel faster and more carbon efficient, but the butterfly effect of driverless cars will start to re-shape other parts of our lives as they become an extension of our homes and workplaces. “Now suddenly a car becomes your workplace, you can have conference meetings in there,” he says. “It will change the nature of suburbs, it will change the nature of strip malls, everything.”
Facebook content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
For now, the world belongs to the baby boomers. The generation of people born between the mid 1940s and early 1960s experienced unprecedented levels of prosperity and job security, but soon they will give way to generations born in less certain times.
Younger generations, particularly millennials and Generation Z, have a whole new set of priorities, Wall says. They’re less attached to conventional status symbols like homes and cars, and don’t see the need to stay in one place or job forever. Businesses will have to rethink their products and messaging to appeal to a generation of consumers that are less bothered about permanence, Wall says. “That challenges how we hire people, it challenges how we market to them, it challenges the fundamentals of the business itself.”
Right now, the process of manufacturing a product is fraught with inefficiencies. Typically, products are designed in one place and manufactured somewhere halfway across the globe. Then they’re shipped back across the world – a process that currently uses five per cent of the world's oil – and stored until they might be needed.
Multijet 3D-printing could change all of that. “What we see coming is a world in which not only ideas and internet business models move that fast, but real physical goods," Wall says. He imagines a world where an item can be sent digitally to a 3D printer at the location where it is going to be used, and printed on demand using the exact amount of materials required. This would do away with the need to transport or store items.
Of course, this raises some questions of its own. Governments would have to rethink import and export taxes if products only cross borders in a digital form, Wall says. With the advent of additive printing, this future is already well on its way, so policymakers should already be thinking about how to adapt to this new way of producing goods.
“Technology doesn’t move in a linear fashion,” Wall says. Processing speeds are becoming exponentially faster while the cost of producing this kind of technology is falling too. “That’s why your phone in ten years isn’t ten times more powerful – it’s a billion times more powerful.”
And it’s not just hardware that’s changing faster than ever before. Technological innovations are leading us towards new business models and ways of working. If we start sending and printing products digitally, blockchain could become a new way of keeping track of items to help deal with tax and copyright issues. Wall says: “Just think of the power of what you could have and what you could potentially do".
--
To find out more about HP's 2018 megatrends, click here or follow @ShaneWallCTO on Twitter.
In partnership with HP. Discover more
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
