Turn of a year, decade, century and millennium

That pesky y2k bug did not really happen, except in isolated incidents. This means that either our preparations were effective, or the warnings were overblown.

The stock market, that visible indicator of growth and success actually went up in the first few months of the new year, but has gyrated nervously since then, as tech-stocks and dot.coms deflated from overblown valuations. And during the last few weeks of the year, the stock market slid to the extent that all the major indices declined for the year, for the first time in a dozen years.

The US elections did not produce a President for more than a month and the result is an uneasy victory for a man who did not win the popular vote, but squeaked in through the quirks of an outdated system. In the most technologically advanced society in the world, the recount fiasco related to voting with thirty-year-old punched-card mechanisms. To cap it all, the House and Senate are evenly split between the political parties, which we hope will now bring a new mode of bi-partisan cooperation.

We enter the new age, somewhat uneasy, but still with a self-assured and balanced perspective that all these changes, though unexpected, are exciting.

Everyone & everything is getting connected

Cell phones, almost a luxury just a couple of years ago, are plentiful, ubiquitous and part of today’s scenery. Many people have already given up the disadvantage of being anchored to a landline and have quickly adopted a single mobile telephone phone-number which can be accessed from almost anywhere in the country, and soon the globe.

Connectivity infrastructure is moving very quickly to connect everything to the Internet, not only through high-speed modems, but also soon through third-generation wireless. Within the next year, silicon will become available to allow broadband wireless connections at a speed exceeding what is possible today with twisted pair land-lines, and rivaling that of cable connections.

The personal-digital-assistant (PDA) has emerged as a common appendage and soon cell phones and PDAs will merge as high-speed wireless access becomes available. With third-generation wireless connectivity (including the new, local-area-network technology called "Bluetooth") virtually everyone and everything will be simply, effectively and economically connected.

Wireless mobility and information services already bring voice, entertainment, Internet access and safety services into cars and trucks. The automobile is quickly becoming the center of a complete range of connected appliances. GPS displays not only serve to provide maps and traveling directions, but also to locate hotels and services. In addition, our appliances and automobiles will serve to locate us, so we’ll be positioned as advertising targets : “Why not have dinner at Ronnie’s Restaurant on the next block?”

Intelligent appliances everywhere

Consider what we need from the products we use: instructions on how to operate the buttons, features and capabilities; history; location; part number; where purchased; when installed; by whom; key characteristics; specifications; diagnostics; availability of spares; replacement alternatives; repair instructions - to name a few. In the past, this information would reside in printed documentation - the manuals - or with trained experts. In the future, the appliance itself will contain all of the required "knowledge", embedded within it and always accessible.

Industrial automation trends

We will have smaller, distributed factories built near the source of raw materials and dismantled when the source is depleted. Operator knowledge, training and assistance will be distributed over the Internet. Coordination of worldwide production and process plants will be through real-time information networks.

Software growth arenas of the past were SCADA, data acquisition and HMI - simply emulating the functions of a DCS at a reduced price. Today, those functions are integrated inexpensively in most equipment, and growth is in the arena of manufacturing execution systems (MES) software and integration of factory and business-wide functions and logistics. Tomorrow’s software will operate multi-processor systems to coordinate peer-to-peer I/O and controls.

The Future is here

The central control hierarchies of the past will give way to new self-organizing peer-to-peer networks, where intelligence resides directly in the sensors and actuators. Chaos-theory based complex adaptive systems will yield results, robustness and operating effectiveness never dreamed of in the past.

Soon, startling new advances will come from bioengineering, as scientists play with DNA - altering chromosomes, adding and subtracting genes, mining the results of the vast efforts that have already been invested in the Human Genome Project. This will bring revolutionary changes in our lives. In agriculture, custom-designed crops will eliminate shortages and genetically developed foods will yield superlative nutritional value. The genomic profile of individuals will be tracked, allowing medications to be targeted specifically for the ailment, resulting in the increase of average human longevity well beyond a century.

Social change

Growth & Success