"One thing we can be sure of is that the particular picture we each have of the future isn't going to happen." At last Friday's Ireland in the Information Age conference, Chris O'Malley of the Dublin City University Information Society Group was cautioning a full auditorium of what the event brochure called "leaders and thinkers from all sectors of society".
"We need to question and challenge ideas about the future so we don't get wrong-footed or taken by surprise," he added. O'Malley was one of 10 speakers in the day-long conference, designed to get people thinking about developing a national technology strategy in response to last March's Government report, Information Society Ire- land: Strategy for Action. Opened by Minister Michael Smith, who sketched a general picture of how the Government viewed "the challenge of the information age", the conference proved that the only certainty is uncertainty.
Michael Tate, manager of British Telecom's research programme in virtual organisations, presented an exciting future of work flexibility due to "the convergence of communications, computing and content".
He showed off "the office on the arm", a James Bond-like contraption with tiny flip-up screen that straps to the forearm and enables email, Web-browsing, phone calls and video telephony. It already exists in BT's labs, he said, but he confessed that the man in his slide wearing the mini-office also had a laptop strapped to his back to allow some of those functions to work.
He also showed an example of virtual conferencing, where two men at a table were joined by life-size projections of two more, beamed in via an electronic link. "The only thing you can't do here is push the biscuits across the table," he said.
The other end of the spectrum was presented by New York Times journalist Louis Uchitelle, co-author of the book The Downsizing of America, which examined the ways in which the arrival of the information age has paralleled a stagnation in most North Americans' wages.
"I'm here to raise your stress level about the computer age," he began, and proceeded to point out how, despite a booming economy, wages and income hadn't risen in real terms since 1973 for 70 to 80 per cent of North Americans. "I would suggest this is part and parcel of the age of technology," he argued.
"In theory, the high technology society works if everyone can enter it," he said, but added that this was difficult for a large number of people for various reasons. In addition, technology was eliminating jobs not just in a straightforward way - for example, shop-floor machinery replacing a number of workers, or ATMs replacing bank employees - but also because it was changing the ways in which companies compete.
"It is now possible to go from earning a middle-class income to having no money at all," he said. This was creating an atmosphere of fear and job anxiety in the US. He also warned that the current rush by hi-tech firms to locate in Ireland could halt when some other country offers better incentives and lower wages.
Chris O'Malley's talk suggested that people tend to view the future as unfolding in one of two ways. The rosy "convergent" model would be a world of free trade, where Internet security issues would be resolved, publishers would pay for content, there would be a rapid spread of advanced Internet services such as interactive video, large companies would re-assert themselves, and technology would stabilise in mass markets.
In the alternative "fragmented" model, trade barriers would remain high, there would be electronic fraud and eavesdropping, broadband services would feature only as premium products for niche markets, viewers would pay for content, there would be multiple technical standards allowing a handful of companies to control technological markets, and finally, society would see the end of jobs for life.
The real future, he concluded, would be neither one or the other but some mixture of the two. However, readiness and planning would enable people to shape the future rather than passively wait to receive it.
Among other sessions, the day closed with an outline of the framework for assessing the applicants for Telecom Eireann's Information Age Town project, in which Telecom will spend £15 million to wire up an Irish town with the latest communications hardware and software. Then RTE's director general, Bob Collins, addressed the issues regarding digital television for Ireland. He said unless action was taken soon, by default the decisions would come from London as Ireland received the spillover from British digital broadcasting.
Karlin Lillington is at: karlin@indigo.ie