I’ve no idea how accurate this information is, but in a short video on http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv there are some wild predictions about the future… under the title of “Did you know?”

This echoes somewhat  “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by the eminent Ray Kurzweil (I saw him present once, and it was truly amazing – this guy has a brain the size of, I suppose, a planet … e.g. he invented OCR when a blind friend complained that the supply of audio books was seriously limited), where the author theorises that technological evolution is almost exponential – ie. the pace of change is accelerating.

Kurzweil reckons the first 30 years of the 21st century will see the same degree of technology progression that the entire 20th century saw, and that the next 10 years will see the same again… to the point where, by the middle of the century, nano-bots will be injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged organs and defeat blood-borne diseases.

Of course, all of this could be a load of old tosh – after all, people thought in the 1950s that we’d all be piloting flying cars, wearing space suits, and eating food in pill-form by the end of the 20th century…

I was reminded the other day of a term coined by Edward Hallowell in his excellent and thought-provoking book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.

Hallowell, an ex-Harvard Medical School specialist in Attention Deficit Disorder, has deduced that technology and the modern way of life & work is turning us all into ineffective wastrels who burn out by the time we’re 50.

He tells a story of how he was staying in a remote cottage which had one of the old rotary Bakelite telephones, and no mobile coverage, and the act of dialling his friend in a nearby village took so long (in reality only a few seconds… the number probably had lots of 8s, 9s and 0s in it), that he was getting madly frustrated. This set him thinking about how strange it was that a simple act of waiting 15 seconds or so for something that normally takes a snap on a push-button phone, should be enough to make him near apoplectic. He started finding similarities in the symptoms of ADD patients he’s treated, and normal people who just get frustrated, distracted, impatient etc, in the normal run of their daily lives.

He’s even coined some interesting new terminology:

Vocabulary for a crazy world

Screensucking: wasting time stuck on the internet or Blackberry when you could be doing some work

EMV or e-mail voice: the ghostly tone of voice people assume on the phone when they are talking to you and reading their e-mail at the same time

Frazzing: when you are multitasking ineffectively

Gemmelsmerch: the ubiquitous force that distracts us from whatever we are doing with the desire to start doing something else

Doomdarts: suddenly remembered commitments such as a birthday or an invitation that had slipped our minds in all that frazzing and screensucking

I particularly like EMV and Doomdarts – been there, done that, many times…