"Our future will revolve around the use of information technology to support our lives - and crucially, we will demand that it is that technology which bends itself to interact with us in a way that we require."
These are the reassuring closing words of a recent report which considers the practical applications of new technologies in Ireland and Britain in the next century. For a refreshing change it is not shackled by a thinly veiled allegiance to one software house or another. Instead it has been penned by one of the brightest technical minds in Ireland and Britain, Dr Neil Barrett. A Government adviser, and a senior computer scientist, Dr Barrett wrote Into the Third Millennium - Social, Cultural and Technological Trends in UK and Ireland Beyond the Year 2000 in his capacity as a fellow of the Bull Cara, information technology services group.
Over 43 pages Dr Barrett considers Ireland and Britain's positions demographically, economically and technologically, and uses this information to portray a picture of how we might practically use new technologies by 2010.
Dr Barrett avoids the temptation to go astral with "what the technology can do", and steers clear of difficult-to-imagine cliches like teleporting and budget weekends to lunar satellites. His vision is very much grounded in reality, because he remains loyal to the notion that new technologies will only develop around demand for their application.
His studies draw four key conclusions:
Companies will need to have an increasingly international focus with the arrival of global electronic commerce;
Flexible part-time work will become the norm, and there will be more women in the workplace;
Britain and Ireland appear to have a technology lead on the rest of Europe;
More intelligent user interfaces will act as bridges between the real world and the virtual networked computer space where so much information lies.
It is this last point that forms the basis of Dr Barrett's report. As people work longer hours in high-pressure service-oriented industries there will be increasing demand for technologies that can alleviate or remove stress. Dr Barrett envisages a software based, intuitive artificial intelligence interface which will act as a mediator between people and the information they seek and requirements they have.
He calls this a "Digital Familiar" - equating the origins of the name to a Witch's Familiar, a demon supposedly attending and obeying a witch. However, the friendlier digital version will present a human like interface to the owner, and because it has built-in intelligence will gradually pre-empt its owners needs. This might include automatically videoing the family's favourite programmes when they are away, or compiling a shopping list based on the family's usual purchases at the online supermarket.
To better portray how such a human-like interface would operate in practice, Dr Barrett draws a pen picture of how things might be in 2010. He is quick to point out it is only an assertion, but the result is not so unreal and seems quite feasible given the technological groundwork that has already been done.
Casting forward to the family home of 2010 there is no television, no telephone, no stereo system in the living room. Instead, there is a large window giving way to sunny scenes of children playing. These are the family's grandchildren in Australia on continuous videolink to their grandparents in Cork, because prevailing zero-tariff international communications and voiceover Internet technology mean the family can afford to retain the video link all day.
The window is a high-definition, flat-screen display driven through a direct fibre-optic cable link. This window is also home to the family's Digital Familiar. Its function is to take responsibility for anything the family wants it to do. When it was first installed it had no personality or distinctive features, but had to be shaped over time. By observing family behaviour it learned about its likes and dislikes and developed into a figure all would react positively to - in this case a young teenage girl who might remind the grandparents of their granddaughters.
Initial tasks it initiated included reminding the family when a programme it liked was due to start, or automatically setting up a favourite TV angle for watching football - behind the goal or on the halfway line.
Dr Barrett makes the point that the Digital Familiar will not be a super intelligent form that will intimidate its owner, but an artificially intelligent personality that will interact in a likeable way. The extent of its application relies solely on how much the owner wishes to use it.
More adventurous applications might include the Familiar working as a Digital Butler intercepting family calls. This could lead to a more sinister extension of the technology, where the Familiar could actually present itself convincingly as its owner in his or her absence.
Business applications of the Familiar can take over some of their owners workloads. By observing their owners repeated responses and diagnostic conclusions they could offer advice to clients of doctors, engineers, and architects.
At government level Digital Familiars are extremely useful in sourcing information for citizens by careering through networks and databases to find relevant information for their owners. The intelligent interface can then present this information to the owner in a format he or she prefers - text only, graphically with pictures and diagrams or orally.
At the government and local authority end the extremely high cost of accessing information for the public has been practically eliminated.
Dr Barrett is not so arrogant to insist this is the definitive view of the world in 2010, but instead he calls it a "provocative idea" to make people think about what might happen. Pointing to the Wizard built into Microsoft products, the graphics in Terminator 2 and Titanic, virtual pets, search engines, the software that controls banners on websites and voice recognition software, Dr Barrett convincingly makes the point that a lot of the technology we need to create a Digital Familiar already exists.
