Future ICT both exciting and frightening

ICT in the future looks very exciting and frightening at the same time.

It is expected to introduce entirely new ways of working, interacting and learning. Let’s begin our journey of ICT in the future.

Convergence: A new era of convergence is coming in the next few years that integrate the common human activities being offered by different providers in varied platforms.

Many people have several different emails, several mobile phones with services of different providers, different messaging and chatting accounts such as Skype and yahoo messenger, different accounts from social media such as facebook and twitter.

It is extremely difficult to manage hundreds of emails, SMSs, calls and other services offered to an individual by multiple providers.

A day is coming where all these different services will be provided on one platform — one roof. People will be required to create profiles that will be housed in secured servers. It will no longer be making sense to have multiple online profiles.

Security of human data profiles will be the next most important guarded critical asset whose protection will be a national priority.

GIS and GPS technologies will be critical and will be integrated in many online services to track the locations of individuals and places. Google Company has already started working on a platform to integrate several services.

Telecommuting: ICT is expected to contribute a lot towards changing the work places. Several organisations in Kenya, including government bodies are recruiting new employees on online platforms — applying and tracking the progress of their applications online.

The future work force is expected to reap a lot from ICT in terms of longer life spans due to improved ways of working.

Communication will be improved due increased use of smart devices and multimedia applications. Performance is likely to improve due to advances in computational systems.

A future worker is expected to be technology savvy because many jobs will be done while at home. Cisco, a leading telecommunication company has over 80 per cent of its work force working at home.

It makes a lot of sense because companies will spend less in renting office space, buying and setting up work stations. Workers will no longer need to sit in the office from 8am to 5pm.

The death of full time jobs is forthcoming and workers will no longer be working for one employer. Small companies will be able to source for experts globally at low costs.

Measuring the performance of telecommuting workers will be a challenge for Human Resources Managers and this would call for better ways of tracking the targets set for remote workers.

This will also be an interesting time. Workers will no longer be attached to their organisations and therefore corporate culture will suffer. Employee loyalty will be divided among multiple employers. Such issues will require to be addressed in the future.

Death of Hard Currency; Birth of Digital currency: The death of hard currency is likely to come. E-money such as credit cards has gained popularity over the last few years because of countless benefits.

Technology is pushing this further and has recently established a new digital currency — Bitcoin — an open source peer-to-peer electronic money.

Cyber Security: Broadband technology will continue to revolutionise the industry. Many Kenyans will be able to access Internet services with their mobile tools.

At least there are 72 mobile cellular subscriptions in every 100 people in Kenya — according to World Bank statistics. The world of the Internet is praised for having positively changed the world.

However, Internet will continue to be the most preferred way of committing the modern crimes. We expect a big war between cyber criminals and cyber security professionals.

Health: In the next few decades, new born babies will have RFID chips and body implants placed under our skin after birth in the hospitals. Identity cards will not be needed as information will be stored ‘inside’ us.

The era of passwords and user IDs will disappear soon because biometric technology has already started implementing successful projects. Innovations such as digital and intelligent pills are under way.

Implant technology is already monitoring human blood sugar and heart rate. Several issues such as privacy and ethics of scientists will be a major concern in future. People are likely to live longer because of the improved medical technology.

It is projected that diseases such as malaria and typhoid will be no longer the biggest killers in Kenya in the next few decades.

We will have new diseases that are attributed the use of technology such as physical pain, eye strain, new forms of cancers and according to some experts even obesity and memory loss cases are likely to go up.

Smart Life and Business: ICT is increasingly becoming a key production and differentiation factor in almost all industries. Innovative applications based on the latest ICT technology have started changing our lives.

Smart life will be manifested in many dimensions such as transport, cities and homes.

For example, innovators like BMW car manufacturers are paving the way towards digitally connected cars in order to: facilitate communication exchange between individual cars; improve security systems; and to have intelligent traffic management to issue traffic congestions alerts.

Loss of human contact: We are likely to contacts with ourselves in a more virtual world. Social being is likely to be compromised by the technology.

For instance, with coming of mobile phones, emails and SMS, we rarely visit our parents and friends.

Humphrey Njogu is a Policy Analyst with KIPPRA, [email protected]