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Future File By Rusty Cawley 
Kevin Bohacz In the year 2015, an engineering team is designing a "space elevator" to lift cargo from the Earth to a station just outside the Earth's atmosphere -- without the need for rocket, craft or crew. As in any engineering task, the mammoth project calls for a plethora of tiny calculations. In the latter stages of the 20th Century, such tasks went to network engineers and civil engineers. But in 2015, according to engineer Kevin Bohacz, those tasks will go instead to software robots. Bohacz is president of C:>Prompt Inc. (http://www.c-prompt-dev.com/), a high-tech solutions firm whose clients range from incubator start-ups to corporate giants such as MCI Communications Inc. "In five years, it will be fairly common for the work of a large number of engineers to be automated," Bohacz says. "In 10 years, it will be even more routine. Eventually, software robots will become as common as pocket calculators are today." The very nature of engineering makes it a target for software. "Engineering is mostly mathematics and procedures," Bohacz says, "which is almost the definition of software." Not that humans will be eliminated from the process. "There are some forms of engineering that software can't handle," Bohacz says. "For example, aerospace engineering. A lot of that is educated, intuitive guessing. Software robots can't do that." College students who major in engineering had better choose their emphasis with care. "Robots will handle just about any computation that asks, 'Will this structure support this load?'" Bohacz said. "A good rule of thumb is: If there's a lot of software in place for your profession, look out!" 
Ed Melia It's a Wednesday afternoon and you need a hot new outfit in time for the weekend. Do you hop in your car, fight your way through traffic to reach the mall and buy your outfit off the rack? Not if you live in the year 2015. "Retailing will look much different in the future," says Ed Melia, managing director of human-resource firm SHL Cyberquest Inc. (http://www.shlusq.com/), which claims to lead the world in placing workers with Internet-focused companies. "The whole idea of shopping will change dramatically," Melia says, "and that will have an enormous impact on the industry's work force from back to front." Instead of driving, Melia says, you will activate your home's virtual reality center. There you will step into a virtual world that acts and reacts to you as if you had walked into a real store. Virtual clerks will wait upon you. Virtual tailors will take your measurements. Virtual fashion models will demonstrate the latest styles. Then you will step into a virtual fitting room and try the fashions on for yourself. Your order will go immediately to a far-off site where specially programmed automatons will size, shape and sew your outfit to your specifications. Overnight delivery (again handled by transportation automatons) will put the outfit in your hands within 24 hours. From start to finish, no human hand will touch your order. The cutbacks in employees, as well as the increased ability to control surplus inventory, will give forward-thinking retailers a tremendous advantage in the next century. As for the workers who traditionally occupy those jobs, they face an enormous problem. "That's the big social issue of coming decade," Melia says. "We have to do a much better job of training young people. The entry-level job is about to vanish." 
Glen Hiemstra You've had your eye on a time-share condo hovering 50 meters above Victoria Falls, but you wonder if you qualify for a loan. After all, credit is tight in 2015, the direct result of the Great Boomer Bankruptcy of 2007. But, what the heck? You put your Air Rover on autopilot and access the vehicle's net link. Your computer scans for lenders. It isolates the 70,321 that make condo loans, updates your UCA (universal credit application) and downloads it. Good grief. Are you going to have to beg 70,000 loan officers for the money? No sweat: There are no loan officers in 2015 -- just loan computers. The technology is already available in 1998, according to futurist and consultant Glen Hiemstra (http://www.futurist.com/). "But the acceptance of new technology is historically a two-generation process," Hiemstra says. "One generation invents the technology but always considers it new because it can remember how things were. The next generation embraces the technology because it takes the technology for granted." Super-regional banks already use computer grids to decide who gets a loan and who doesn't. Automated tellers offer cash transactions in remote locations. The Internet allows consumers to handle their accounts without talking to a single human. Yet banking is still dominated by brick and mortar, flesh and blood. "We're at the point in banking when we're waiting for that second generation to fully embrace what technology offers," Hiemstra says. "When that happens, there go the tellers and the loan officers and just about anyone else who does a job that a computer can do better." 
John Freivalds MindTrek Corp. is ready to launch its new line of holographs for the in-home virtual reality market in time for fall 2015. The new product, "Interactive Tours of the Jovian Moons," will appear simultaneously worldwide. Thus the user's guide must be translated into 71 different languages ... right now. Will the multi-national hand the English version to 71 linguists to translate its 1,700 pages at the human pace of about 300 words per minute? Not a chance, according to John Freivalds, a marketing consultant with language technology firm Logos Corp. (http://www.logos-ca.com/). In the future, companies will let computers do the job more quickly and more accurately. "Ten years ago," Freivalds says, "linguists were the most important players in the translation process. Now, it's technology." Linguists will give way to project managers, who will handle the ever-growing need for translation work with software applications. "The amount of material that requires translation will grow by 300 percent by 2005," Freivalds says. "The number of languages required will increase from 30 to about 80. The amount of time available to wait for a translation will shrink to almost nothing." In the years to come, technical writers will dictate manuals to a voice-recognition computer, which will then translate the copy into any language. A CEO in Kansas City will be able to converse with a CEO in Beijing, with a voice-recognition software handling the translation. A news service will be able to translate a report written in German into scores of other languages for immediate distribution. "In a global market," Freivalds said, "where new products are released simultaneously worldwide, companies can't afford to wait for a human to do the translating. They need it now, not in a few weeks." 
Bob Treadway The top biotech partner for Andersen Price Cooper Ernst Deloitte & Peat has just learned he must arrive in Seattle next week for an emergency meeting with the CEO of multi-national conglomerate WorldDominaTech Inc. Usually the partner would hook into the firm's virtual reality suite for the meeting. But the CEO insists upon maximum security; that means an old-fashioned, face-to-face pressing of the flesh. It's May 5, 2015. The meeting is set for May 7. What does that do to the partner's hectic, filled-to-the-brim schedule? He asks his palm-sized, wireless, automated assistant. The device checks his schedule, resets appointments, makes flight reservations, shuffles projects and basically tells the partner what to do next and when to do it. The partner has no human assistant. No one does anymore. There are no travel agents. There are no medical transcriptionists. In fact, there are no "knowledge workers," those employees who take down analog data and turn it into a finished form. "Those are the Information Age's equivalent of street sweepers," says futurist and consultant Bob Treadway (http://www.trendtalk.com/). "Intelligent-agent software will take over their functions." Less sophisticated devices are already taking dictation, routing calls, handling e-mail -- tasks once handled by personal secretaries. The job of personal secretary, according to Treadway, will soon go the way of the elevator operator and the pin spotter. And that could cause real problems for society. "We might see unemployment at 15 percent to 20 percent," Treadway says. "If corporations can choose whether to keep people in those jobs or to have machinery do that work flawlessly and at no cost, which way will they go?" -- Cawley is a reporter at the Dallas Business Journal © 1998, American City Business Journals |