GLIMPSES OF THE FUTURE - JUNE, 2006
A monthly digest of technologies, developments and trends that will shape our lives. (If you would prefer not to receive these digests, flip back 'NO THANKS' and you will be removed from the list).
The Future of Medicine
Doctors are usually reticent about speculating on the future of medicine. But at a recent round-table discussion for the 'New Statesman" magazine, several senior research physicians were unusually forthcoming - particularly about the emergence of the "expert patient", cancer therapies and high-tech psychiatry.
On In-body Chip Implants, Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief executive of the UK's Medical Research Council and Waynflete professor of physiology at Oxford University said:
"There will be rapid advances over the next ten years, with new approaches to treatment and prevention. Personalised approaches to prevention will be with us in 20 years' time. This will direct other emerging technologies, such as people monitoring their personal state of health, function and phenotype. In 20 or 30 years, people will have an implanted chip that will monitor a wide range of indicators of their state of health, coupled remotely to an internet-based personal prevention diagnostic system.
"We will see the expert patient coupled with the internet, and advisory systems coupled through personal monitoring of health, guiding the approach to lifestyle, diet, prevention and, where necessary, early diagnosis and treatment."
On Cancer Treatments, Professor Salvador Moncada, Director, The Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, University College London, predicted:
"There has been a massive investment in modern cancer therapy over the past 20 years and these areas are about to come to fruition. Over the next ten years we will see the development of safe, effective anti-cancer drugs without side-effects. We will be able to find combination therapies that will delay the disease in such a way that people can have a normal life with the treatment."
On High-Tech Psychiatry, Professor Robin Murray, Professor of psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London commented:
"When you see a physician, he or she takes your history and says: 'This could be X, Y or Z. We will do some tests.' If you go to see a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist listens and says: 'In my clinical judgment, this is anxiety, depression or schizophrenia. I will now treat you.' With the huge advances in neuroscience, neuro-imaging and behavioural genetics, when you go to see your psychiatrist in the future, he or she will say: "We need to do some investigations." If someone is paranoid, the psychiatrist will say: 'Is the paranoia related to depression or schizophrenia?' We can now put someone in a PET scanner and look at their dopamine function to see if it is the onset of schizophrenia. Or we can put them in a virtual reality suite, in a particular social situations to see what makes them paranoid.
"Behavioural genetics is having a profound effect in determining factors of cognition and personality in the normal population. I think psychiatry may end up as the highest-tech branch of medicine rather than the lowest-tech, as it is now."
The Device Formerly Known As 'The Mobile Phone'
What word or phase will we substitute for 'phone' as more and more functionality is added to this ubiquitous device?
In the last month a 'phone' with built in iris scanning has been announced. This personal identity-checking feature is claimed to operate at the highest level of security and a standard 256MB mobile can store the templates of 250,000 known irises and query a remote database of over one million records. Results are produced inside one second and the chances of an incorrect match are reported to be one in seven billion.
At the same time in-car navigation aids (currently a top selling gadget) are about to be usurped by the mobile. A new report claims that by the year 2010, 30% of in-car navigation will be delivered by low-cost services on 'mobile phones', rather than on dedicated sat-nav devices. I don't think the report goes far enough. The 'mobile device' will sweep away dedicated sat-nav systems and I'd say dedicated systems will own less than 40% of the market in four years' time.
Still on 'mobile phones' (which is where all the hot hardware development action is at the moment), my story last month about the 'Redberry' knock-off being sold in China (with Chinese governmental collusion) prior to the arrival of the real Blackberry is now explained.
RIM's Blackberry encrypts the emails sent to users with a form of encryption which is unbreakable by the Chinese authorities. As a result, the device has not be given full government approval and its distribution in China will be limited to sales to employees of multi-national firms.
Finally on this topic, Nokia has banned the word 'phone' from its executive lexicon. Senior company officers now have to call the devices "multimedia computers." Think it will catch on? No, nor do I. But it highlights the problem of having no language for our technological future.
The Awakening Global Brain (2)
I've been muttering for months about Google getting progressively smarter. Now the company has come clean and has announced that creating strong artificial intelligence is a core corporate aim.
Speaking at Google's Zeitgeist '06 conference in the UK, company president Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page gave an insight into "the ultimate search engine" which they say they are now developing. Page said real AI may be achieved "in a few years."
While we wait (and while Google becomes smarter organically) here's a fun Google hack which underlines just how far Google has to go before it's ready to pass the Turing test.
John Updike Vs. Kevin Kelly
John Updike, my favourite living novelist, has recently decided to take on digital culture by launching an attack on Kevin Kelly, a writer and futurist I also admire (see last month's Glimpses). Kelly wrote a piece for the New York Times extolling the advantages that digitization brings to 'books.' Updike hit back insisting that he himself is one of the "surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the digital sunshine."
Updike claims that Kelly's vision of digitized books becoming part of the '"free-to-be-sampled" net culture will deprive writers of income and will loosen the definition of "a book."
"Books have edges," said Updike “Sometimes hard edges, sometimes soft edges, and it is up to authors and booksellers everywhere to defend those edges.”
Both men are partly right, but neither understands the other's world. As a writer of both fiction and non-fiction it is clear to me that much reference work and non-fiction will move quickly to freely distributed electronic form. Payment for writers of such works will come from personal appearances, talks and related activities.
But fiction (and polemic/linear non-fiction) will remain a linear entertainment form, and writers will continue to be paid by both publishers and readers. Fiction and narrative non-fiction will also remain on traditional paper (in the vast majority of cases) for at least a decade.
And While We're On The Subject of Books...
Amazon is maintaining its innovative momentum. Thanks to it's global reach and second-hand books sales, almost every title published in the last 50 years can now be found - and cheaply. The benefits to global education are profound.
The next important innovation will be the offering titles on a "print on demand" basis (or alternatively, "download on demand").
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and president told shareholders at a recent annual meeting that producing custom-made books and DVD's to order was now possible because of the low cost of the reproduction technology.
"As a customer, if you get a product from Amazon, you might never know it was printed yesterday," Bezos said. "I think we'll see more and more products created instantaneously."
Last year, Amazon acquired BookSurge LLC, an on-demand publishing company which has been credited with helping publishers keep books in print cheaply. It's also an inexpensive option for self-publishers.
Finally... Are You Expecting A Child Soon?
And, if so, do you plan to store his or her natural stem cells (extracted from the umbilical cord and placenta) in a stem cell bank? Stem cells are valuable "prototype" cells which can potentially be coaxed to become almost any type of human cell - liver, kidney, bone marrow, brain, etc.
The first "cord bank" for storing and maintaining umbilical stem cells opened its doors in 2004 in the UK and, as the number of diseases that stem cell therapy can treat is increasingly rapidly, this is an idea whose time has definitely come. At present the odds of an infant contracting a disease in later life which requires such treatment is roughly 1 in 100 (although stem cells can often be used to treat siblings and other family members if the DNA match is sufficiently close).
But in the future medical researchers are expected to be able to do much more with stem cells (despite a recent scientific fraud uncovered in Korean stem-cell research) and the odds of an individual needing a treatment based on compatible stem cells is likely to rise to 1 in 2. It is anticipated that stem cell therapies will be useful in treating heart disease, hypertension and other common ailments,
If I were expecting a child soon, I would certainly be making arrangements for such an insurance policy (more details here).
In the UK stem cell banks are government sponsored and worldwide their are many private cord banks ready to store and maintain this precious substance (the world's largest stem cell bank is in Korea).