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News from the attic: Looking back at predictions about the future

When we look back at predictions about the future, it is often to deride them as being very far from the reality that has emerged. Not so with this month’s chosen article, “Into the telecosm” by George Gilder, published in the March-April 1991 edition of Harvard Business Review. He predicts “During the next decade, our computers and televisions will give way to image-processing “telecomputers” that will not only receive but also store, manipulate, create and transmit video programming. At the same time, cellular telephony and other mobile communications will open up to everyone.... These technologies will transform commerce. The first computer systems enabled companies to become – or go on being – hierarchical and centralised. The new technologies will allow for the evolution of peer to peer networks.” The author foresees that the telecommunications infrastructure will limit this and recommends “a technological solution to the bottleneck: a system of fibre-optic cables reaching every home in the country.”

His comment about the effect of peer to peer networking on hierarchical and centralised organisations is particularly interesting in the political arena, given the popular uprisings that have occurred in recent years around the world, which have been so facilitated by mobile communications.

Calvert Markham