Nostradamus

My family got its first television relatively late, not I think, for any reason other than that they were expensive. Lord Finkelstein and I would go to neighbours to watch programmes. What exactly ... I cannot remember. In any case it was not much of a hardship and a black and white television soon appeared, followed much later by a colour television, or truthfully, a green and yellow television. The delay in getting a television had however, a psychological effect; I was fascinated by the idea, garnered from somewhere, that one day I would have a television in my wristwatch.

Last week, after some months of waiting, my new Pebble watch arrived. I had better explain what it is, in case some of you do not read technology blogs (even though you are, after all, reading this). The Pebble is a 'smart watch' whose development and production was crowd funded through Kickstarter. It uses an e-ink display, rather like a Kindle, and can run apps and display notifications, integrating with my mobile phone. Not actually a television on my wrist, but near enough, and surely streaming video is not far away. I would like to say that the Pebble has made me the envy of friends and family, but clearly -no. It has, possibly, reinforced my tech nerd credentials which were already pretty strong.

The experience set me to thinking about technology futures. As anybody with an exposure to technology research and development knows, it takes a very long time for ideas to transition from the lab to the market, often with loops and excursions in between. It is pretty certain that if a technology is going to get to the wider market then it has been around and about as a research concept for some time, probably not in the exact commercial form it will eventually assume, but near enough. Of course, there are some research concepts that never make the transition and that live on as neat and scientifically interesting ideas and there are others that suddenly and unexpectedly prove commercialisable. This leaves a large group of technologies that require little by way of foresight. These technologies may need refinement, the right 'packaging', reductions in the costs and perhaps changes in the cultural or regulatory environment but they are clearly  destined for widespread use.

So without further ado, here are the profserious 10 (inveitably) predictions of 'obvious tech' - no brain futurology, though actually I have left a little space for controversy. Coming to a high street near you ... soonish.

Driverless cars. Safer, more fuel efficient, probably faster, there is no question that, in conjunction with 'smart'  infrastructure this is the future. Already half here with assisted parking. 

Immersive entertainment. Virtual Reality with crazy helmets and immersive experience rooms. Really not such a big distance from 3-D films, game environments and theme park simulators. The Star Trek holodeck beckons.

Drones everywhere. We are already fighting our wars with them and there are near-in applications in areas such as industrial inspection. Will we be using drones for every day tasks such as delivery and logistics as well as, obviously, security? Unquestionably, yes. 

Flexible displays. These seems to have been in development for a long time but there are now some convincing prototypes. The applications are innumerable, ranging from easily packable screens to display integrated with clothing and on all sorts of surfaces.  

Augmented reality and gesture/movement. The unholy matrimony of Google glasses and Microsoft kinect. The technologies are rough round the edges but this is more about getting the 'packaging' right rather than anything much more fundamental. 

Digital life record. The idea that you could have a complete digital record of your life might have seemed a science fiction concept. Want to remember what television programmes you and your brother watched, back in the day? Simply search for it. Already our 'digital trails ' are very rich and with video, location and 'quantified self' information fused with external devices (your pay TV box, for instance) and records (your supermarket loyalty card records, for instance) we get near the life record. A few things to iron out, integration obviously, and ethical and privacy issues. 

Quantum computing. We have the first rudimentary devices for computation and communication already and the theory seems to be developing. As it stands there are a limited class of algorithms that benefit from quantum computing approaches, but some of those we have are powerful for application in security and cryptography. The cat is out of the box. 

Connected digital health. Full digital health care that integrates personalised genome, proteome, metabolome and physiome data with health monitoring devices with imaging and with a full digital health record has achieved widespread currency as an idea. Realisation is another thing. Despite our near-in failure to realise an integrated medical record in the UK and despite a plethora of diverse standards, despite even some significant differences in scientific views, this will happen. 

Body augmentation. The stuff of science fiction, think Neuromancer, but actually implants and prostheses are a reality, think Paralympics. What might arise when this crosses over with tattooing, piercing, wearable electronics? Plausible technically and culturally. 

Automatic translation. Having mentioned science fiction I had to mention the Babel fish. The capability of existing translation engines, for instance Google translate, is stunning. The availability of large corpora of translations plus crowd sourcing has aligned with better natural language processing and much improved machine learning. Speech processing has also got a lot better - try dictating to Siri if you don't believe me. More and faster compute makes a difference too. Real-time automated speech translation has to happen.