technology

If you’re not a fan of the Bush administration, the 2000s was a horrible decade politically. Economically, not so hot either.

But for technology, it was an amazing decade. Here is a very short list of things that either did not exist in 2000 or was in its nascent stage: high-speed Internet, Amazon.com, the IPhone, Google, MP3s (and the whole digital music economy), blogging software, digital photography, HDTV, GPS units, low-cost video editing and recording, and as much as I hate to say it, Facebook.

Think of your five favorite web sites, or five favorite electronic gadgets. Did any of them exist in 2000? What about 2005? Technology improves exponentially, and for the first time we’re able to see these improvements develop over the span of years rather than decades. Barring a cataclysmic event (if we can make it past 2012, we’ll be safe), I think the rate of change will continue to accelerate. As different as 2010 looks than 2000, 2020 will be even more different compared to 2010.

My guess where the most interesting advances are going to come from in the next decade will be in medicine.  Here’s one example: bionic eyes. They are primitive today, but it’s just a matter of time for them to improve in resolution and functionality. And if you accept that bionic eyes will improve slowly but steadily, then you can extrapolate to a time where they become not a substitute for an ordinary eye, but an improvement. Eyes that see better than 20/20, have night vision, and can take photographs and record video.

I have no way of knowing the year this will happen, but it’s not a matter of if, it’s when. And that’s just one small example of a change that is both extremely likely to occur in the next 20 years and will challenge what it means to be human.

I have no idea how far away this next milestone is, but I think the biggest game-changer in the field of medicine would be a completely accurate simulation of the human body, one accurate enough to model the effects of new drugs.

Instead of testing drugs by running trials on rats, then small groups of humans, then large scale studies over a general population (a process that take years), what if you could do the same with a simulation? Feed the molecular map of a drug into a computer model of a human, and find out its efficacy in hours instead of years? It would literally speed up the development of new drugs by 1000 fold.

Obviously, this is an extremely difficult task that will be solved in small steps, but even getting part of the way there would help accelerate the development of medical technology. Maybe scientists will make progress on this in the next decade.

Switching tracks, I think the area most ripe to receive the benefits of new technology, and has yet to do so,  is education. Especially higher education. I’m dumbfounded how colleges and universities have been wholly resistant to using technology to lower costs, or at least to reduce tuition increases. Even uncreative ideas like online learning have yet to take hold. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that it is hard to objectively determine a college’s quality.

It’s easy to figure out whether Laptop A is better than Laptop B. You compare its specs: processor speed, memory, hard disk size, and so on. But what if you’re a novice computer user, and all that info is gobbly-gook, or worse, none of it is easily available. All you have to go on is price. You are going to assume the more expensive laptop is going to be better than the cheaper one. Which is a rational thought to have, because price and quality are usually connected.

But now lets assume that you’re in a market where most the laptop buyers are looking for the best laptop, but only know the laptops’ prices. In that environment, having a lower price is a detriment. Even if a company figured out how to make a laptop faster and cheaper than a competitor’s, it has an incentive to keep its price high, because that’s the only signal of quality the consumer has.

Another example: you need to get heart surgery. Surgeon A charges $40,000, Surgeon B $80,000. Unless you know both surgeon’s credentials, operation history, and success rate, you’re going to feel uncomfortable going to Surgeon A. There has to be a reason he’s cheaper, right? And this is important: it’s your life.

I think that’s part of the reason college costs keep rising faster than inflation. There’s not enough incentives to keep costs down, and not enough dependable information for consumers (especially top students) to comfortably choose a cheaper college than a more expensive one. Price is still the primary indicator of quality, and most people choose cheaper colleges because they have to, not because they think it’s the best option quality-rise, or the best value. Until that dynamic changes, and colleges that educate well for an affordable price become as valued as getting admitted to an Ivy-league school, the motivation to use technology and innovation to lower costs won’t be there.

In summation, 8 years of Bush trumps 1 year of Obama, and the fact that we’re not in another Great Depression is no sprinkles on ice cream. But the IPhone rocks and the next decade will bring us a world of new shiny objects to buy, as long as you don’t attend college, which in that case you should sell a kidney now while it’s still worth something. Scientists are already at work on an artificial kidney.