Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Top Ten Trends
20102020
By
Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle
Author of eighteen books on web technologies and
systems analysis
Industry Analyst
Managing Editor, xmlToday.org
kurt.cagle@gmail.com
@kurt_cagle on Twitter
Top Ten Trends of the 2010s
Generations The New Media
Petroleum OS Ends Open Data/Open Govt
The Great The Emergent
DisIntegration Education Era
Smart Grid OS Bioinformatics
Virtualization HyperPresence
Generations
Each generation establishes an indelible footprint
on a given era,
A generation is both influenced by the preceding
generations and influences the following
generations
The exact boundaries of generations are seldom
clear cut – think of a generation as aggregate
behaviors.
Baby Boomers (19441962)
Leading edge now retiring (65 in 2009)
Fixed income outflows – shrinking economy
Will place heavy demand on social services
Most heavily impacted by the Great Recession
Relocation into cities and nearsuburbs – smaller
houses or condos, city services
Will form bulk of the volunteer economy moving
forward.
GenXers (19631981)
Becoming primary policy leaders, entrepreneurs
and authorities
Architects of the Web, technical/engineering
oriented, focused on standards and code
Independent – libertarians or civil libertarians,
live agile methodologies
Distrustful of large institutions
Will have the biggest stamp on the technical
foundation of the next decade
Millennials (19822000)
First social media generation
Nearly as large as Boomers (Echo Boomers)
Very entrepreneurial
More likely to be involved in communication/media
Concerned about transparency of gov't & business.
Mashup generation
Environmentally sensitive
Virtuals (20012019)
Smaller generation than GenXers
The Google Generation – information is pervasive
and immediately accessible
Hyperconnected – always communicating
First postcorporate generation
Systemic thinkers
NeoTribalists
The Petroleum Operating System
The Energy production and distribution system can
be thought of as an economy's Operating System
The Petroleum OS is now 150 years old, and
dictates transportation, power generation, urban
infrastructure development, financial systems,
food production, political organization, education,
marketing and media and nearly everything else.
The Petroleum Operating System is crashing ...
Peak Oil – The End of Cheap Oil
Cost to produce energy
exceeds energy value
Global Oil Peak 2007?
Demand Still Growing
Max Prod: 85 Mbls/d
Trough Oil: Everything
from here gets harder
Energy Shocks
Energy Shock Cycle
Economy Improves, Increases Demand
Demand Increases Price, Fixed or Falling Supply
Price Reaches a Peak, Dragging on the Economy
Economy Crashes, Price Plummets
Cycles increasing in frequency, severity
Gluts Become Smaller, Shortages Longer
Average Price Through Cycle Increasing
Petroleum OS and Credit
Credit derives from energy/resource reserves,
which cannot consistently meet demand
Without guaranteed reserves, credit dries up.
Without credit, businesses are forced into cash
accrual model, with higher exposed risk.
Most megacorporations are built with leveraged
credit; as credit recedes, they disaggregate.
20102020 is the Great Disintegration.
The Smart Grid Era
Decade will mark transition to the Smart Grid era.
Smart Grid – merging electrical production grid
with societal information networks
Smart Grid supports localized, sustainable energy
production, with intelligent creation, transmission
& storage of power.
Consumers become prosumers, with those
contributing to the grid gaining most benefit.
Smart Grid as Open OS?
Petroleum OS Smart Grid OS
Proprietary Open Access
Centralized Decentralized
Forces Segmentation Enables Open Standards
Vendor Lockin Competitive Cooperation
High Barrier to Entry Low Barrier to Entry
Forced Upgrades Allows for Versioning
Benefits Producers Benefits Users, Prosumers
Smart Grid Economy
Smart Grid economy is emergent (bottom up)
Communities seek energy independence
Those that don't face unreliable power
(worse than no power, in many respects)
Smart Grid standardization insures that as a
community comes online, it can connect to grid
Smart Grids allow community participation, and
community member renumeration
Smart Grid and the Internet
The Smart Grid is the next stage of the Internet, and
will build out in much the same way the web did
As such SG becomes an overlay of networks:
Energy, Messaging, Data Abstraction, Application,
Social Media, Financial Services, Resource
Distribution, Governmental Services
Electrical standardization moves transportation onto
the Smart Grid as well.
Adapting Transportation Grid
Electric cars (though car use declines, generally)
High speed rail replaces air travel, save for light air
craft
Light rail, ebusses, trolleys reemerge
Trucking remains but becomes more local
Shipping favors rail, winddriven ships
Most vehicles are hybrids – oil provides extra
power, but is not prime motive power.
AltEnergy
Biofuels
Algae, Yeast, Hemp, Sawgrass, Biowastes
Requires Genetically Engineered Agents & Enzymes
Solar photoVoltaics
3rd Gen pVs, Flexible pV Membranes,
Photosynthesis, Supercapacitors,
Beamed Microwave Energy
Thermal Gradient Systems
Kinetic Systems
High Altitude Kites, Water Snakes
SGOS & Society
SGOS fosters citystate hubs; power shifts away
from national back towards municipal level.
Physical manufacturing relocalizes, virtual
manufacturing (software and services) globalizes
Management & marketing lose influence,
technical/creative gain influence.
Corporations are either physical, local and
persistant or virtual, distributed and transient (or
both). In all cases, they're small.
Virtualization
The rendering of physical entities as software
Cloud the virtualization of hardware
Software as a Service the virtualization of
standalone applications as sets of web service
streams
Next big wave is virtualization of data, with the
web as collections of read/write databases
This concept is intrinsic to RESTful Services
Virtualization and SGOS
Virtualization moves up the stack
Virtualization of government occurs as
governmental functions become exposed as
services in the noosphere
Virtualization of the media is already underway.
Virtualization of education is happening as the POS
educational system collapses.
Each replaces topdown hierarchical systems with
bottomup distributed systems.
Search, Services & Semantics
We are switching from process oriented
applications to resource oriented (RESTful) ones
Introduces a search/query oriented view of the web.
Search services will retrieve collections of links to
resources, packaged in various forms.
Update services will activate messaging actions
based upon publishing of content.
Computational semantics will drive both search and
publishing.
Social Media
Social Media makes all human experiences
virtually participatory, before, during and after
the fact.
Social Media is absorbing gaming, conferencing,
education, training and entertainment.
Social Media platforms will continue to emerge,
eclipsing older platforms and services.
Social Media will also be foundation of Augmented
Reality
NeoJournalism
PaleoJournalism NeoJournalism
News is scarce News is ubiquitous
High barrier to entry Low barrier to entry
Professional Domain expert as
journalists journalist
Editor provides Community provides
gateway function filtering function
Branding is key Search/Word of Mouth
Advertising driven Ancillary services driven
Open Data / Open Gov't
Next Stage of Web – Web as Database
Orgs will expose both public data services and data
editors via REST, XML and JSON
Gov't Big Data Standards – NIEM Framework
Semantic Web Matures: RDF/OWL & Linked Data
Businesses improve transparency via XBRL
Everything becomes (somewhat) intelligent
Education's Failing Grade
Existing 19th/20th century education infrastructure
disintegrates
Funding collapses due to credit shock, fuel prices,
reduced tax base and demographics
Educational systems fail to deliver competent
graduates for information economy
Centralized curricula removes flexibility, targets
generation of mediocrity.
Kids becoming idiot savants – knowledge at their
fingertips, but with few tools to analyse it.
Rethinking Education
Online education webs may provide
communities of learning
Distance learning decouples teaching from
location
Education becomes life-long activity
Social education becomes biggest issue
2010s will see an explosion of alt-education
forms
Teachers, like journalists, will be the next
professionals to face amateurization, to be
replaced by guides, mentors and quisitors.
Hyper Awareness &
Augmented Reality
Geoinformatics becomes pervasive
Wearable computing comes of age
Location/topicality channels create a where web
Financial transactions become transparent
Motion aware overlays enable inplace virtual worlds
People rent their lives vicariously.
Percentage of people who live and/or work in virtual
worlds exceeds 30% by 2020
BioInformatics
Electronic Health Records become Open Data
Standardization leads to bottom up revolution
Disintegration of private insurance monopolies in
US
XML Based EHRs create distributed web, another
part of the Smart Grid
Epidemiology, emergency response merge with
Smart Grid (via US National Information
Exchange Model, or NIEM)?
Summary
Institutional society will disintegrate over the next
twenty years.
What replaces it will be distributed, emergent,
virtual, communal, highly participatory and
metaphorical.
Declining resources and overstressed ecosystems
will increase conflict globally, but will also
hasten the transition to sustainable models
These changes will come from the bottom up.