IBM's Five Predictions For the Next Five Years 219
PolygamousRanchKid writes "In each of the past five years, IBM has come up with a list of five innovations it believes will become popular within five years. In this, the sixth year, IBM has come up with the following technologies it thinks will gain traction: (1) People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling, and even from water flowing through pipes. (2) You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password and thus redefine the word 'hack.' (3) Mind reading is no longer science fiction. Scientists are working on headsets with sensors that can read brain activity and recognize facial expressions, excitement, and more without needing any physical inputs from the wearer. (4) The digital divide will cease to exist. Mobile phones will make it easy for even the poorest of poor to get connected. (5) Junk mail will become priority mail. "In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem that spam is dead."
Re:It'll still be spam to me (Score:4, Informative)
Directed emails addressed to a specific individual that explain how and why a potential partner or provider is contacting them are not only legal, but necessary as the "cold call" of the internet age.
Broadcasting to purchased mailing lists using BCC addressing or mailing list processors are spam, and a completely different scummy approach to advertising that smacks of the door to door salesman who won't take "No" for an answer. It's intrusive, it's rude, and the only thing spammers do is guarantee that I will never, ever, ever buy a product from the spaming vendor.
Re:Anyone who thinks they can predict the future.. (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you. I opened up the comments to ask how their predictions for the last 5 years went. Something I always look for in an article about someone's predictions for the future is how did they do in the past at predicting the future. Unfortunately, most such articles never bother to tell you that the "prophet" they are quoting is not better than random at predictiing the future. If the source they are got one big thing right, they will tout that, but never mention that that one thing was one out of 100 and the other 99 weren't even close.
Maybe opening up the article would have served you better than opening up the comments. From the article...
New predictions aside, IBM’s track record of predictions over the past five years has been somewhat mixed. Let’s take a step back to 2006 and look at its predictions:...
They then go on to assess the prediction that the commenter made above but with a more generous tone than that being applied above. In general they treat them as though they were general business predictions (e.g. smartphones get smart...not that they literally read our thoughts) rather than acting like IBM is claiming to be a group of religious prophets.