The World in 2030

66 The World in 2030
This new ‘medium’ (and what a poor, underpowered term
that word is) is one in which people and things will be ‘always
on, always connected, everyone to everyone, everything to
everything, always and everywhere’.
That last long-winded and very wordy sentence was
necessary because we don’t yet have a word or a phrase to
describe such a pervasively connected electronic firmament.
But even though we are just starting to build this new
habitat for humankind, and we lack the language necessary
to describe it, the technology will be in place, fully mature
and available at very low cost in all countries of the world
(and in space and on at least one other planet) by the year
2030.
Everybody is familiar with the internet and its graphical
interface, the World Wide Web. Everybody is familiar with
cellular phones, television and radio. The new components
in this merged ‘wireless super-web’ are minute intelligent
machines that will communicate with each other wirelessly.
At its simplest, these machines may be no more than plastic
Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID tags 128 ) that send
out self-identifying signals and data when interrogated by a
nearby wireless scanner. On a more complex level, machine
sensors will be embedded in bridges and other vital structures
to transmit data about stress loading and construction
integrity. Machines transmitting wireless signals will travel
our bodies sending out information about our physical
condition and, to pick just one further example, firemen
in burning buildings will all wear wireless sensors that send
back their position and details of the conditions they are
encountering.