Down among the IT doom-mongers

Amongst top forecasters with the ear of government scenarios on the future are full of doom.

James Woudhuysen reports on how they may alter the course of IT. For the potential in enterprise IT and computer-aided manufacture never registers today.

Official thinking on the future has become more Apocalyptic than ever.

So when I listened to a civil servant, a scientist and a researcher in design each talk about the next 50 years, I wanted to hear how IT might come to the planet's rescue, should a rescue really be required.

Anxiety was certainly at a high level. In 2054, the feeling is, Western business schools may find their students and thus their campuses moving to India, where the world's real wealth creation takes place. We will be hit by failing states at the eastern end of the enlarged EU, Islamic boycotts of our goods, a demographic timebomb, lifespans of up to 120 years, and employers who demand DNA tests to check our personalities.

Air quality will be kaput. Homes will need to have a neutral impact in terms of energy, carbon emissions and waste. Venice could be underwater. Last, global warming would increase the range of 'invasive alien species' coming into Britain. Fewer beech trees, more Colorado Beetles.

Amid the learned panic, IT-intensive printing did win admiration. Hewlett-Packard, it was announced, has begun work on machines that will print human cells, so helping kidney patients to not so easily reject the organs they are donated. Stereolithography, in which lasers are programmed to etch out prototype products from solutions of photosensitive polymers, could become an in-home phenomenon. So could our old friend, screens made of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).

The locational aspect of IT was also popular. To improve life on the street, it was argued, displays on your mobile will portray different kinds of flowers, depending on where you are, and poster sites will adjust themselves when they detect your presence. Territory itself will be laden with IT interfaces, as BT's concept of 'digital air' - connections available to you everywhere you go - comes closer.

Meanwhile, IT will help improve not just the detection of animal infections in the lab, but also the traceability of those infections in the field. There will be an RFID tag in every cow, chicken and sheep.

It sounded a bit hopeful.

Our designer invoked ambient environments - spaces which could be aware of the people within them; spaces, or even clothes, filled with computers that could be, variously, ubiquitous, pervasive and invisible. She also insisted that to send a text message is to go 'micropublishing', and that the next five decades would see a lot more of that producing, rather than just consuming.

And yet for all the nods in favour of IT, it remained the repository not just of hopes, but also of fears.

We would live - already live - in a surveillance society. I heard a new argument: that Britons will need the countryside, even if they never visit it, so as to fight the stress brought on by email.

Altogether, there was little sense that IT could help us resist the Threats of Tomorrow. And there was no sense whatever that it could raise productivity levels in the Third World and so mitigate medical and social problems there.

The potential in enterprise IT and computer-aided manufacture was never registered.

IT entertains British policy wonks, it appears, only in urban, residential or biological contexts. Production? That is indeed left for Indians to worry about. James Woudhuysen 31 July 2004

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