The good news is that my absolute favorite technology guru Dave Evans, Cisco (News - Alert) chief futurist and chief technology for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), as usual wowed them with his speech at the recent Cisco Live event in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Vegas is like Washington, D.C. It is a great place to visit but tends toward what comedian Mark Russell once said about our nation’s capital, “It is a 68.3square mile piece of real estate on the Potomac River surrounded by reality.” And, while listeners gushed over Dave’s Top 10 disruptive technologies that will change the world in the next 10 years and beyond, it may be time to ask a simple question: “REALLY?”

Just because we can means we may, or are likely to do so. However, never underestimate the unexpected. Think about all of the things pundits (including mea culpa, me) have missed over the years including, PCs, cellphones, and the Internet to name a few we missed even as they were happening.

Just because we may means that while things will obviously change, possibly for the worse, it does not automatically mean disruption. In fact, using terms like “disruption” or “disruptive” is great for speeches, but context seems to be in order. Markets -- the aggregation of people making individual decisions based on perceived value -- and not technologists have a nasty habit of determining what is disruptive and when.  “The wisdom of the masses” has been appropriately identified as a major trend.

That said let’s take a brief tour of Dave’s raves.

1. The Internet of things: More things now communicate than people and virtually everything will be “smart,” context-aware and communications capable.
2. The zettaflood is coming: This will be a tsunami caused by an increase in the number of things we have, and an explosion in video (think Google+ Hangouts and Facebook video calling along with real and streamed HD and 3D TV and the billions of YouTube (News - Alert) videos waiting to be created at work as well as at play).
3. Wisdom of the cloud: That flood of stuff is going to be stored and processed, enhanced and disseminated. The industry uses words like “smart,” “enriched” and “value-added” to make it sound “compelling.” Others use terms like “manipulated” and “targeted” and “leverageable” when evaluating what it can mean as opposed to what it can create and do.
4. The next 'Net: Yup there is always a “next ‘Net” that is bigger, better, faster, more agile, etc. This, in turn, can, for example, be a platform for what is called "quantum entanglement" — two particles are entangled, separated by any distance, and when there is a change in one the other is changed. Think of this as a key element of Star Trek like teleportation.
5. The world is flat and so is your technology: Yes it is. Simultaneously, in the words of Apollo 13 commander James Lovell, “the world is looming larger in the window.”
6. The power of power: With world population growing exponentially (and with more than half of the world’s population under 35 years old and set to have children), fossil fuels and today’s batteries won’t cut it. Evans says help is on the way.
7. It’s all about you: We are early on the learning curve of what is possible with miniaturization resulting from the massive deployment of nano and other technologies. Fantastic Voyage-like abilities to find and fix medical problems, coupled with organ growth, cloning and man-machine integration enabling better visualization and virtualization do hold the promise of improving our quality of life.
8. The next dimension. Tomorrow: anything on demand: Additive manufacturing (3D printing involving joining materials to make objects from 3D models data and using layering to replicate almost any physical item including human cells) is here in nascent form and could revolutionize manufacturing.
9. Another family tree: AKA, the introduction of avatars and robots to our families and places of work which we interact with on a much deeper/smarter level.
10. You…only better fundamental changes: Yikes! Futurist Ray Kurzweil foresees a time (2054) when so much of who we are physically and neurally can be augmented with technology that the distinction between man and machine disappears and a new species is created. Evans points out that the pace of self-evolution is quickening.

Dave certainly makes you sit back and think. And, while his job is to make us aware of and imagine the seemly unimaginable, I always feel when listening to technology futurists like I have just consumed a meal of my favorite Chinese food. I am satisfied by the experience but still hunger for a thick chocolate shake to finish the meal and slack my continued hunger.

Context — a long view

Putting aside the medical and manufacturing predictions, the communications bigot in me looks at the insights about zetta data tsunamis, sensor and camera over-lording and all things cloud with a smile on my face, and an “of course” on my lips. The history of communications up until Marconi, Morse and Bell was a subset of the history of transportation —Pony Express, trains, trucks, etc. Afterwards, our progress can be seen as finding new ways of replicating real-time, up-close interactions that fully engage more and/or all of our senses over dedicated communications media.

A way of looking at this is that we went from a single phone in the house, to multiple phones in our ears at various times, to screens in every room and on our persons with higher audio and visual fidelity. It thus makes sense that breakthroughs in computing and the carrying capacity of our dedicated communications channels will not only make user experiences more tactilely compelling in terms of the textural quality, but more nuanced and context rich based on presence, location, ease-of-use, and user control to mediate our multiple personae. 

Watch The Jetsons Meet the Flinstones

I was once asked by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who I thought were the true visionaries of our age when it came to computing and communications. My response, which did not appear in the paper, was, “William Hanna and Joseph Barbera… the best way to understand where we have been and where we are going from a technology standpoint is to look at the difference between The Flintstones and The Jetsons.” (For those of you not familiar with these cartoons, check them out on Hulu). Ah! But there is the rub.

The made for TV movie The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones (first aired November 9, 1987) in many ways is a seminal work. The families trade places in time respectively swapping the Stone Age and the Space Age. They ultimately decide there really is no place like home. The reasons are that, after all of the goggling or peevishness about dealing with a changed technology environment, much of the human condition, particularly relationship challenges —among humans, between humans and their pets and robots and between humans as they interact with their machines and instruct them to interact with each other —were best dealt with in the context of things that are not disruptive. Technology is a time-sensitive and useful enabler. Technology does not disrupt things, the people using it do.

Back to Dave

What does all of this have to do with Dave’s list? Quite a bit. A few quick points may shed some light.

The Internet Age at the end of the day is about trust.

If we do not trust that our always on/all ways connected electronic volition is safe and secure, it all falls apart. And, note that by “our,” I mean our personal volition as expressed in our multiple online personae as well as the policies and rules that can be dynamically enforced by the companies we work for and in the personal and professional groups we interact with.

I wish Dave’s list had included things like advances in voice and facial recognition, retinal scanning etc. Security and privacy are the Achilles’ heels of the online world. I could use some reassurance that technology to protect all of us from ourselves and the over reach of our institutions and bad actors is keeping pace. I wish there was more on what can/is/will be done about cyber wars that could destroy electrical grids, financial networks and communications links.

 I once heard noted digital age guru Don Tapscott say that the smart sensors in our clothes would interact with the smart ones in our washing machine and send that information to the makers of laundry detergent as well as the electric utility to assure the wash was done at the least expensive time.  What he did not say, especially regarding things moving to the Cloud, was who will be minding that data store. From Sony to the Pentagon to the Murdoch problems (hacking as well as being hacked), recent history is not reassuring.

The biggest “revolution” of the Internet Age has not been a technological one

The biggest revolution of the Internet Age has been the total overhauling of the historic relationship between buyers and sellers the availability of instantaneous detailed information it has created. Like it or not, thanks to technology, the future belongs to the buyers.

As we devolve into an Alvin Tofler world dominated by “the market of one,” the issues surrounding whether technology designed to protect us is up to pace, and whether the institutions in which we should be placing our trust are worthy of it (companies as well as governments) needs to be a cornerstone of futurist speculation. Divorced from the news coming out about how we learn and its impact on how we behave, now would be a great time for the technologists to talk with behavioral scientists.

One thing is clear. The companies that adjust and accommodate the speed of change in the buyer/seller relationship will prosper and those who don’t won’t. Dave got that part right; it is all about us. We want what we want, the way we want it, at the time we want it, at a price we perceive is fair and under terms and conditions where user control and trustworthiness are paramount. Technology has the wherewithal to enable this. I guess if you want to call that disruptive, rather than argue semantics I will agree.

 I’ll have that chocolate shake now. “The times they are a-changin’.”

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel (News - Alert), France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.