Electronic Evolution: A user’s guide to the near future

Nothing dates so fast as the future - tomorrow's PC is likely to encourage our mobility

IT WAS up in the high branches of the Ivory Coast’s Taï national park that researchers made an extraordinary discovery. Here, the Ethologie Animale et Humaine research group announced last month, Campbell’s monkey -a species of primate that never grows more than half a metre tall and is related to the Diana monkey – has been recorded talking to one another.

The monkey’s root vocabulary is basic, no more than six words when prefixes and suffixes are attached (hear some of them here). What the scientists found most exciting is the way in which the animal strung these words together to form long sentences, as they believe it provides clues as to the basis of human syntax. But just as remarkable are the words themselves, which have meanings such as broken branch, leopard below and eagle above.

These last two (“krak” and “hok”, in Campbell’s speak) seem especially pertinent because, in developing separate words that tell the monkey which way to look when a predator is present, they suggest most strongly that these primates have developed language uniquely as a response to their environment.

Humans may well have developed syntax along similar lines, but we have long since found other uses for it. Almost as important are the ways we have developed for communicating. Here, the pace of progress is accelerating, and it seems a good time, at the end of yet another decade when the world became ever smaller, to look at some of the developments we’ve seen in the past 10 years and how they point to the future.

We first extended our language across time and space around 6,000 years ago, when Mesopotamian traders devised a way of recalling complex deals that challenged their memories. Writing wasn’t really improved upon until the invention of the telephone in 1876 (beating radio to the patent office by 15 years). With the advent of affordable sets in the 1960s, television has really only found itself seriously challenged in the past five years by streamed content (BBC’s iPlayer had 88.2 million requests last year) and, although we’re some way off doing away with the goggle box (replacing it with the Google box, perhaps?), what is happening here points to the kind of communications convergence we can expect to see across the board in the coming decade.

It should lead on to more fully-realised home entertainment systems, with broadcast, online and telephone services coordinated through home servers, allowing a far easier choice of different media in separate rooms. This could have potential revenue ramifications for organisations such as Sky – in fact, diminished profits from online ventures will almost definitely become an abiding theme in the coming 10 years, despite the advance in available services for consumers. But it also points the way in how we use our media. For example, viewers who hear mention of the Battle of Stirling Bridge while watching Braveheart will be able to open a screen-within-a-screen and research the historical event on the internet while the film plays on. In allowing viewers to compare and learn, these unified systems will augment our media experience. Augment, perhaps more than any other word, will define advancement, certainly in the next couple of years.

The past decade took us through the tipping point on how we take our media. And while this is a disastrous development for the newspaper industry, a debate still rages as to how news will be delivered to us. Much of the smart commentary has its money on smartphone development, where a lot of the convergence debate is focused. This will lead to an epic battle of the titans this year when Google is expected to launch its much-anticipated Android phone. The search engine has put one over Apple with Android, making it open source and inviting users to improve upon it, to collaborate and share, very much in tune with the online mood of the times.

If Apple insists on retaining control over every aspect of its products by releasing only to platforms it owns, the much-vaunted apps cottage industry of the past 12 months could suffer cot death. There is a happy medium here for Apple. It could take the root that Sony has with its enormously innovative Little Big Planet title. It encourages collaboration through user-generated content and a huge ability to customise, while keeping control of the game on a barely visible but firmly-attached leash. LBG employs some of the sideways thinking on gaming we’ve come to associate Nintendo with over the past five years, and we should expect to see more titles like this that allow families to play and marvel together – and smile.

Not everyone believes we’ll take our media through smartphones. Amazon reported that not only had it shifted half a million of its Kindle e-reader at the tail end of 2009, but that on Christmas Day sales of ebooks on the site surpassed those of traditional copies for the first time ever. The sceptics pounced on Amazon’s reluctance to release figures that would allow like-for-like comparisons, such as with the iPod, for example, which could help paint a picture of what sort of future the Kindle and other e-readers might have.

It could be, of course, that many potential buyers here are holding back for further development, such as more fluid indexing, easily accessible passage-marking, and the ability to annotate, currently only available in rudimentary form. Perhaps development here could be led by Microsoft, which has vast experience with such functionality through its Word and Office products, particularly as the software giant is about to enter a bruising 12 months in its ongoing war with Google.

It’s easy to forget how little we knew about the search engine back in 2000 (the company is just 12-years-old), but it seems intent on picking fights everywhere. And Microsoft, which has responded with its own Bing search engine, is its greatest rival. With the launch later this year of Google Chrome OS, it is aiming a knife at the very heart of Microsoft – at Windows, the company’s foundation stone – by moving the operating system to the cloud. It could speed the way to portable devices that combine the features of netbooks, e-readers and perhaps mobile phones.

There’s still some unease about having your life stored on a server in Iceland (the temperature there has made server farms a real growth area), but no doubt most of us will move past that as we did concerns about security on Facebook, and worries like it. In fact, remote servers are set to become far more common, as they allow for high functionality on websites, and for the pooling of resources between like-minded organisations. However, one note of caution (as WalesHome.org found out to its cost): there has to be a move towards fixed and fair contracts between providers and users, and better ways of overcoming unforeseen problems.

But it is augmented reality, the annotated world, Web 3.0 – call it what you want to – that is most likely to command our attention in the coming two years. This will allow you, for example, to climb from a train in a foreign city and, just by pointing your smartphone’s camera at the landscape before you, will help you to book a hotel, find a restaurant, DM English speakers in Twitter. Much of the objects the camera crosses will be annotated in the way that Google Maps can now be used, which will bring strength to the hyperlocal movement.

So the next decade is all set to be Google’s once again. And it’s quite possible that while we benefit from all this free advancement, we will also have to deal with problems that begin at Google’s door. There are ostensibly two, and they both arise out of aggregation. The first is that the continued move to online means more and more people will be airing their views. Until now, it has been a heresy to argue that all opinions are not valid, even while we all make jokes about nutters on the internet.

One of the small chinks that Google has perhaps left open could be filtering. More content will require more filtering, even if wildly varying quality wasn’t an issue. One of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism projects that recently won funding focuses on filtering, and should be interesting to follow. For the rest, it looks like crumbs from the feaster’s table. Google has proven very good at making sure it makes the most money from the internet, and has demonstrated no qualms in closing out any competition, so any nascent filtering business should be fully prepared for a game of cat-and-mouse.

However, sooner or later it will have to face the long-term consequences of aggregation. Google has created the expectation of free content. This has compelled many originators to release for nothing what they have paid to produce. Google is then able to index that content and drive advertising revenue off the back of it. It makes a profit where the originator does not. It’s easy to waive away such concerns when it is newspapers doing the complaining, but this Robin Hood approach begins to fall down when it is small organisations, one-man bands and fearless investigative reporters who aren’t able to make a living from what they do because they cannot compete with such large corporations.

Now that Bing has signed a deal with NewsCorp to pay for content, there is precedent. Few people are going to sympathise with Rupert Murdoch. But they need to get away from this example and consider that it will only become harder to generate original content. It may bring about a far more low-cost, localised news service and end the dominance of news organisations (save the BBC, we presume). But it will also bring a realisation that information is not infinite. That might not happen in the decade to come, or the one after that. But come it will, and it will do nothing for our own evolution.