42 LISTENER NOVEMBER 5 2016
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Y
ou’d think a futurist and poly-
math would need to do a lot
of reading to keep up with the
technological and scientific
trends shaping the future. But Peter
Cochrane, a consultant and former
technology chief at British Telecom,
claims he will no longer read books.
It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy reading- there’s just too much information
to absorb, so he’s given up trying.
“There’s a new book published
every 13 seconds, a professional paper
every 13 milliseconds and an interest-
ing blog post every 13 microseconds,”
he told a room full of Wellington
bureaucrats in October.
Instead, Cochrane phones or
visits the world’s top scientists and
technologists and asks them questions
about the cutting-edge work they are
doing. But for those of
us who don’t happen to
have Elon Musk or Ste-
phen Hawking on speed
dial, there will soon
be a more convenient
option: the truth engine.
The closest thing
we have to it at
the moment, says
Cochrane, is IBM’s
Watson supercomputer.
In 2011, Watson took
on two humans at
Jeopardy and left them
in the dust. With access to a 15-tera-
byte database, the computer could
cross-reference contextual hints in
the trivia questions and deliver verbal
answers within fractions of a second.
Watson, which is now used for
everything from weather forecasting
to clinical decision-making, is still an
expensive piece of equipment. But
an exponential increase in processing
speed will soon make supercomput-
ing capabilities as accessible as a
Google search on a smartphone, says
Cochrane.
With faster, more precise answers
to queries, information overload
will be reduced. That will have big
implications for learning. Cochrane,
who has two engineering doctorates,
says university degrees will have less
significance in future.
“The ability to solve problems nowtrumps pure and isolated academic attainment.
People are doing their own thing, not obeying the
rules and following procedures; they’re innovating
and adapting on the fly.”
As long as there is willingness to
adapt, he is optimistic about the
future of work. “No technology ever
reduced employment. Technology
almost always disrupts employment.”
He foresees a future without pilots,
stock traders, personal assistants and
call centre workers, but with the new
roles of wisdom archivist, truth-
engine mediator, genome designer
and risk profiler.C
ochrane’s presentations feature
many of the typical futurist
themes: the Internet of Things,
3D-printed cars and body parts, artificial intelli-
gence engines. He predicts the overlapping areas of
nanotechnology, biotech and information technol-
ogy will be the sweet spot of innovation in coming
decades, as the point where people and technology
are increasingly merging.
He has a favourite image to symbolise it: a row of
robotically controlled combine harvesters mowing
down a wall of corn, rolling on into the future.Technology, Cochrane reminds us, is already keep-
ing us fed, healthy, employed and mobile.
But what about the technologies we’ve been
less willing to embrace, such as genetic modifica-
tion, which has connotations of “Frankenfoods”,
despite there being no evidence they’re harmful to
humans?
Cochrane admits he doesn’t really know the
answer. But he points to the introduction of
vaccines and the huge advances in his field of
telecommunications to show that once the benefits
of new technologies become apparent, society
embraces them.
As for predicting the future, Cochrane has a
simple formula: everything that’s coming in five
years already exists; 10 years out, half of it is still
restricted to scientific labs; 15 years away, 80% is
in the labs. And looking 20 years ahead? Given the
present pace of change, that is the stuff of dreams,
says Cochrane. lPeter Cochrane’s presentations and articles are free to
download from http://www.cochrane.org.ukStuf of
dreams
Are you worried
technology’s going
to steal your job?
Better start training
now as a truth-
engine mediator.
by Peter Griin
TECHNOLOGY
Cochrane has a simple
prediction formula:
everything that’s coming in
ive years already exists.
Peter Cochrane: foresees a
future without pilots, stock
traders, personal assistants
and call centre workers.