Shock of the Future: Welcome!

I am sure that many people on Habrahabr read a wonderful book by the British journalist Alvin Toffler “Shock of the Future”, written back in the 1970s, but not lost its relevance today. I allowed myself to borrow the title of this wonderful work, because I think that it fits best with the theme of this habrapost.

We, humanity, people, live in an era predicted in the 70s of the last century. The shock of the future is what surrounds us every minute, and the manufacturers of new equipment and technologies only bring closer the moment when the masses will have to face the changes that have already occurred in the environment.
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Our society is undergoing enormous structural changes - the transition from an industrial society to a super-industrial one. And this change overwhelms people. Accelerating the pace of technological and social change leaves people disconnected, they suffer from “crushing stress and disorientation” caused by the shock of the future.



There is no need to go far for examples. How long have you been faced with the task of helping your parents deal with naughty technology? What percentage of people do not use any other smartphone features other than calls? Nevertheless, in 2013, according to Gartner's forecast, about 1 billion units will be sold to smartphones, while all sales of mobile phones will reach 1.9 billion units. Already this year, any buyer of the phone (regardless of their will) will acquire a smartphone with a probability of 2/3. A little more, and the user will not be able to buy a TV without Smart TV.

In the struggle for the buyer and the user, there is a “great battle of ecosystems” - each manufacturer tries to expand its sphere of influence on the end user. What is the main distinguishing feature of what is happening now from the same struggle in the past (for example, the “market partition” of a PC between Windows and other operating systems)? Very simple - the speed of the changes. How long did IE take to build on the positions of a monopolist? Appearing in 1995, it has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, reaching 2002-2003. for this indicator, the maximum mark is 95%. Chrome, which appeared in 2008, currently occupies a third of the market, a quarter belongs to Mozilla Firefox.

Do new players have common features in the browser market? Of course, the "race versions." Continuous updates are the only chance to keep up with the accelerated pace of events. Some products are sometimes even forced to abandon their key features in order to somehow survive in this race (recall Opera and its abandonment of its own engine).

Want more examples? Excuse: the release of Firefox OS as an operating system for mobile devices. Remember the joke about who will release their first OS - Nero or ACDSee? It turned out the first to be a browser. Or, for example, Ubuntu for phones and Ubuntu for tablets - this example is even more interesting. To expand the sphere of influence, the user of the “desktop” Ubuntu is offered to install it on a device made by another manufacturer (ASUS, Samsung) and released under a different trademark (Nexus). The open bootloader and the openness of Nexus devices played an interesting joke with Google. It remains only to see whether this “raider seizure” of Ubuntu will bring success. Fight ecosystems? Of course.



To keep consumer's attention, manufacturers surround it with an ecosystem of their products. It is already pointless to cite “clouds” and “content” as an example - with the mass distribution of digital photography and music (as well as other data), the market giants iCloud, SkyDrive, Picasa, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote are struggling to deliver and deliver them. , Yandex.Disk and others, because the amount of information is constantly growing, megabytes and gigabytes is not enough, and now unlimited storage, limited only by the speed of the Internet, hastens to the rescue. But we are still waiting for the advent of "wearable computers" - Google Glass: the choice of such a device will also automatically "tie" the user to a particular ecosystem.



Do I need to cite as an example the race megapixels - first in digital cameras, and then among digital cameras in smartphones? But we are still waiting for a race of screen resolutions among desktop wearable PCs (laptops have already captured this pedestal). In such cases, increasingly looking for the guilty - "damn marketers!", "Again they figured out how to powder our brains!". However, in fact, the reason is that existing technologies do allow to double the resolution on both mobile and other devices. In the past, marketers simply could not “popularize” such abrupt transitions just because they were technically impossible.



A huge amount of seemingly impossible things are happening (moreover, have already happened) right now. Re-read your old posts on Habrahabr, look added to the “Favorites”, remember how often people wrote: “Who needs this? This will never happen! ” However, around us 4G LTE network. In our pockets devices with multi-core processors. IE is no longer the main browser on the planet. There was a first video session between browsers. Android has taken half the market. We look at photos from Mars and live broadcasts of jumps from the stratosphere. X86 devices hold battery power at ARM level. Not incredible enough? And how many predictions about mobile devices ... Until now, with affection, I remember the longest comment on Habrahabr (alas, I cannot find a link to it), where the author for a long time, several paragraphs, reasonably and confidently explains why the iPad never-never-never will not be popular. But he relied on his experience, on the situation in the world, which seemed to him transparent and accessible for analysis, he was not impaired by the ability to "know."

It is not for nothing that Toffler popularized the term “information overload” - we meet it through advertising on television and radio, through banners on the Internet, fight off the spam flow (it’s a joke, the share of spam among all sent emails has long been 80%!).



What will happen next? Then it will only get worse if this term can be applied to technical innovations. In fact, technology will be better and better, but it will have the most disastrous effect on all of us, residents of the 21st century, fans of smartphones and tablets.

4K video is waiting for us, which our flagships will not be able to play. We are waiting for the tightening of the struggle of ecosystems - Android in the refrigerator, smart home systems, which allow to turn off and turn on the light or save electricity, the first bio-electronic prostheses ... This is just the tip of the iceberg, the first tide before the tsunami or the first avalanche snowflake. Look at the devices that prepare us for this: Google products - imagine a freshly presented Chrome Pixel with a connection to Google Fiber (1 Gb / s).



With such speeds of access to the “cloud storage” with a size of 1 TB (which, by the way, is already provided for 3 years - a very optimistic forecast of the life cycle of the device), you can understand why the device does not have permanent memory. We no longer imagine a device that is not permanently connected to the network. In fact, the next qualitative transition in the field of batteries can give simply unimaginable growth to this market, the era of “post PC” has really begun and cannot be stopped. And in the world of hardware components, transistors are waiting for their replacement, which will displace them much more quickly than they defeated vacuum tubes. Recall neurocomputers, Wetware - similar to Software (software - "soft product") and Hardware (electronic hardware - "hard product"), developments based on the connection of biological neurons with electronic elements were called Wetware (eng.) - “wet product”.



Did you notice the speed with which new items are introduced and immediately leave the stage? 3D-monitors, 3D-TVs, 3D-smartphones, 3D-tablets - and now at MWC'2013 it is not possible to track down the “three de”. We criticize the Post of Russia (and not only it) for much, but mainly for its inability to correspond to our pace of life. We don’t imagine how to organize a meeting in a conditional place without using cell phones, how to find a way in unfamiliar places without maps, we criticize Google Glass for a strange look, but we are looking forward to when wearing such gadgets will become normal. Paradox? Still would.

And if right now you put your hand above the keyboard or touch screen to write a sharp answer (“Nonsense, people master and master everything, I mastered it!”), Remember that you are a technically advanced user, and besides you there are many people for which technology is still a miracle and a mystery. One should not think that the “shock of the future”, or, in a certain assumption, “the shock of the present” can befall only a savage from a distant island, who miraculously found himself in civilization.

Everything that surrounds us, everything that we are accustomed to, is hopelessly becoming outdated every second. Do you see the difference between the auditory tube and the first hearing aids? Between glasses with diopters and augmented reality glasses? What is the abyss between a wooden crutch and prostheses with neurointerface? How quickly will humanity learn to use a simulated human brain? How instantly will most science fiction ideas be implemented?



Recall living examples of how ordinary, moderately educated people in Singapore in the 1970s could not refuse to keep chickens or pigs after moving to high-rise buildings. Think of the first computers occupying breathtaking spaces, and that all this did not happen once and not in science fiction books, but here and now, among us. Remember your parents or relatives - is it easy for them to get acquainted with technologies like you? After all, it's not just about age.
Think about it. And welcome to the future!