regardingjohn

The Globe and Mail offer this article: Behold, the trends that will unchain us from the office. The author speaks of a crazy future only 10 years from now:

By 2017, knowledge-based jobs will be free to move anyplace. “We’ll take it for granted that you can go anywhere and get wireless Internet access,” Mr. Cooper adds. Most people will carry mobile Internet devices (“the iPhone on steroids”) with instant messaging, e-mail, a phone, GPS functions and productivity applications, he says.

…come 2017, “context-aware” mobile services will allow people to control and manage the kind of information they receive, and when and where they receive it, Mr. McDevitt says. For example, a mobile user might choose to receive messages or calls based on who they are from, or what kind of information they contain; calls and messages from clients and business prospects might be given greater priority than administrative e-mail from the office. And of course, the device will know where the user is at all times.

… “In addition, with the move to ecological sensitivity, we will see increased pressure to keep people from commuting,” Mr. Cooper says. “Wireless will be the foundation. People will demand it. There will be no computers in fixed locations.”

My own thoughts on this are that ten years is a long time to wait. I might, however, be riding on a high tech high, fueled by my recent iPhone purchase (love it), but if I have to wait ten years for this stuff, there’s a serious problem.

Okay, so there *is* already a serious problem: our nation has goofy priorities and seems to have largely given up on itself and its people. We aren’t spending the money we should be spending on a public technological infrastructure, universal health care, sustainability, or public education. Instead we’re exhausting our resources fighting a preemptive war against a country that was never a threat, defending the rights of corporations to plunder a poorly-educated populace that “should know better how to manage their money,” while at the same time cutting the money meant to educate that populace, or diverting it to the private corporations that make standardized tests designed to measure failure more than success.

But I guess I’m optimistic, and hope that we’ll be over that soon (hopefully far less than ten years!), and well on our way to having an intelligent infrastructure to support an intelligent populace, because I believe strongly that with the right tools, we can learn and do amazing things.