The brainiacs at IBM made some pretty far-out predictions this week: In five years, they say, you won't need passwords, there will be no more digital divide, and mind reading will no longer be science fiction.
Forgive us if we take issue with the last one. Five years ago, in a similar list of predictions, IBM said that by the dawn of 2012, "mobile phones will start to read our minds."
IBM has been doing these predictions for decades. Back in the '80s, they looked 10 years out, calling their prognostications "Ten Year Outlooks." But nowadays, things move at Internet speed, so in 2006, IBM started publishing "Five in Five" lists of the five innovations their researchers believe will change the world in the next five years. They're fun, and they give the company some concrete goals. "These are things you can actually hold our feet to the fire over, to be honest," says Bernie Meyerson, an IBM fellow and vice president of innovation.
Wired asked Meyerson, the guy who helped put IBM's Power chips in nearly every gaming console out there, what he thought of his company's January 2007 predictions. The following are IBM's five predictions of what the world would be like in 2012 -- along with Meyerson's comments -- and a ranking of the prediction on a scale of one to five stars.
1) We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world.
Meyerson's score: Five stars
"The healthcare one we nailed. It's astounding. There's an entire factory near Mayo clinic where people fly biological samples in every day and essentially just make use of the fact that the globe is flat to be able to transport precious samples for diagnostics.
"Apart from that you also now have people who do remote robo-surgery. It's not just telemedicine, but literally you could have a remotely accessed robot where the surgery could be performed by a remote location… this is something that simply came to pass."
Wired's score: Three and a half stars
IBM did call it right when it came to remote medical treatment. But if you read their predictions, they also talk about disease monitoring and "virtual doctor check-ups" at home. Remote disease monitoring is starting to happen, but how many of you have had a virtual checkup?
2) Real-time speech translation -- once a vision only in science fiction -- will become the norm.
Meyerson's score: Three stars
"Real time speech translation has arrived, but it's limited deployment. I would give that a three only because [while] the underlying science and technology showed up -- it is possible, we've done it and demoed it -- it's simply not pervasive."
Wired's Score: Two stars
It may be possible, but it's not the norm. If you want to see a Universal Translator in action, you'd best to tune into Star Trek.
3) There will be a 3-D Internet.
Meyerson's score: Three and a half stars
"3D Internet depends on how you want to look at it. 3D per se has shown up…. If you're playing a game that's in 3D and you're playing it on your TV, guess what, it's in 3D and it's being played in shared player technology across the Internet.
"It hasn't permeated, but here we were a little more careful. In the previous one we said it would be the norm. It's not. I'm not going to say this is five out of five. It's probably three and a half."
Wired's score: Three and a half stars.
We'll give this one to Meyerson. IBM definitely saw the potential of 3D gaming, even if they did go a little nuts, incorrectly predicting a Snow Crash-like "interactive education, remote medicine and consumer experiences," on the 3-D Internet.
4) Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance.
Meyerson's score: Five stars
"If it's a one-to-five scale, that's about an eight. We just nailed that. Nanotechnology has just become absolutely pervasive. Even the devices, the transistors themselves, that you use. the critical device elements in those are typically now 1 to 5 atoms thick. Sensors themselves are now one molecule thick.You cover a surface with a molecular layer of material that is sensitive to a particular chemical and then you have that act as a trigger to an electrical device. What happens is that mono-layer is chemically specific to what you're looking for and when that stuff shows up it sets off an alarm. It turns out that those kinds of capabilities have just become incredibly important."
Wired's score: Five stars.
OK smartypants, lets see how you do with the mind-reading cellphone.
5) Our mobile phones will start to read our minds.
Meyerson's score: Four stars
"This one, honestly, eeeeh, it's getting there, but uhhh, let me explain. I don't think the title actually represents well what we're talking about. This is not about reading minds. You'll forgive us, we're not always perfect with the labels.
"Remember back then [there] were very few GPS-, for instance, capable systems. Now not only is every system GPS-capable, but in addition to that, even if GPS is unavailable because you're indoors, it triangulates off two or three of the nearest cell towers and gives you a location within a few hundred meters, which is fantastic."
"I would give it a four out of five, only because the label isn't great. But quite honestly it really is very well established. If the label had said there will be location-based services and they'll be dominating, then I'd give it a five."
Wired's score: Four stars
They're not reading our minds, but we keep learning that these location-based services know more about us than we'd previously estimated. If you read IBM's fine-print from back in 2007, they were really talking about the advent of location-based services, which, five years later, are everywhere. They called it, but they lose a star for jazzing it up with that mind-reading stuff.
All told, IBM really didn't do so badly with its 2007 predictions. Meyerson is certainly happy with the results. "There supposed to be hard and we're supposed to fail," he says. "In IBM we spend, roughly speaking, between $6 billion and $7 billion a year in R&D," he says. "If we can't predict these things with some reasonable level of accuracy, even though they're stretches, that actually doesn't bode well for us."
"The flip side is every one of them is right, then you're not trying hard enough."
