As Gartner gets ready to celebrate 20 years of its Symposium , senior analyst Richard Hunter bravely – and somewhat somberly – looks 20 years out.
“Have I mentioned that every 20 years, the world is a completely different place? I would predict increasing fragmentation of society. I would predict that privacy will be redefined in ways we can currently not conceive, because the 20th century definition of privacy is not viable in the 21st. I think we will see new social contracts — between citizens, between citizens and their governments – and it’s possible that things get to be very dark, that technologies of information dissemination and analysis can also be used for control purposes, and that the world will tilt very heavily toward a controlled – and even conflicted – environment.”
I am not brave enough to look that far out – as Ray Kurzweil says “ We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today ’s rate). ”
I am willing to stick my neck out in a few areas over the next 5 years based on research for The New Polymath:
