Next week sees the World Hi-Tech Forum 2008 taking place here in London, with a particular focus on India. Stephen Timms MP (Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform) will be kicking off a session that I'm speaking at, entitled 'Beyond the Internet.'

My focus is the theme of 'seamless global communication', looking beyond what is already happening in our interconnected world to what is likely to happen over the coming 3-5 year time period. I'll be picking up on themes I set out when I delivered the NCC's 40th Anniversary Keynote on 'Technology Adoption' (and it's hard to believe that was nearly two years ago!).

The general direction of travel of technology itself over the coming 3-5 years is relatively easy to narrate. More complicated of course are the impacts these technological changes will have on a variety of levels, including the economic and the social. Which is why I'm intending to look at some of the wider aspects of technological innovation, including updating some of the ideas I set out in my Vision 2020 address and my Keynote on 'Inventing the Future' at WorkTech 07 at the British Library.

The more we move into this age of an Internet-powered mesh of devices and people all inter-communicating with each other, the more we need to address the underlying identity, privacy and security issues too. This is of course a topic that I've returned to many times in this blog, most recently in connection with my Financial Times article on new models of security and privacy. As we scale up from the existing Internet and Web world to one that is truly ubiquitous and pervasive, we ignore issues with the underlying architecture at our peril.

Equally valid too are issues related to the user experience, which is why I've long been a fan of the work of my colleague Bill Buxton. You can design all the innovative, most fantastic technology in the world that you like, but if you don't address the usability elements, what's the point? After all, we still seem to live in an age when most companies can't even get the interfaces for remote controls for home audio video systems, or mobile phones, right. Yet the coming age of billions of interconnected people and devices will challenge us to come up with far better ergonomics and design. Technology does not, or should not, operate in a vacuum detached from the reality of us as human beings ("users" if you must). The interfaces we will use in the future are likely to be very different from those we are familiar with today. Craig Mundie touched upon some of these potentialities in his recent presentation at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference.

One thing that all of these changes illustrates is that the world is not flat. In fact, interconnections on this scale are enabling more specialism and diversity to emerge. Indeed, in a world with a tendency towards technological convergence the interesting counterforce is the divergence we are witnessing, the increasing value being placed on specific devices and interfaces for specific purposes rather than the Swiss army knife model.

And as we move into this interconnected and increasingly immersive world, some of the greatest challenges are to our understanding of the 'real' world and the 'virtual' world (although, as I have written before, 'virtual' is entirely the wrong word since the 'virtual' world is as real as our physical world. Perhaps we might more accurately call it the 'digital' world). As David Deutsch wrote in his thought-provoking book 'The Fabric of Reality':

"Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our 'direct' experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we experience the signals in our nerves directly - we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them ... all reasoning, all thinking and all external experiences are forms of virtual reality." (Deutsch, 1998, pp. 120-121)

My most immediate challenge however is how to bake all of these ideas into a succinct and engaging 20 minute presentation for the World Hi-Tech Forum next week. Given the richness of this topic area, and the many elements it brings into play, I must remember that less is more ...

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