Technical communicators will be called upon to help layworkers perceive and comprehend increasingly large chunks of knowledge rather than specific products and processes. Knowledge management will not just be a business term: schools, small organizations, and even families will begin to archive, search, and constantly re-configure large pieces of information.
There will be an enormous breakthrough in one or more of the following fields: transportation, biochips, and cybernetics.
- Transportation- we will discover a vastly cheaper and easier to use method of transportation which will reduce the size, waste, and general inaccessibility of vehicles like ships and planes. It may be teleportation, or simply matter reconfiguration for the textiles and related industries. Regardless, personal transportation will likely become something we do only for pleasure.
- Biochips – it’s already known that our brains have far more processing power, and infinitely more flexibility, than contemporary computer processors. It’s also already in the works to combine organic material with silicon processors. We will be successful, and will discover how to incorporate information (and possibly processing power) into our bodies. This will make for a revolution in how we conceive of education, and will create the widest division in history between the “haves” and the “have nots.”
- Cybernetics – we’ll further develop our methods of reconnecting nerves and creating delicate and responsive artificial limbs and organs. This advance, ostensibly for those crippled by accident or from birth, will lead to experimentation in enhancements for people without disabilities. We will no longer worry so much about steroids taken by injection or orally: instead, athletes will have small implants which will create the illegal substances only when needed. Additionally, we will see an unprecedented number of accidental deaths among the young rich looking for excitement. They will have their bodies enhanced in unusual ways, and then burn, climb, starve, or plummet to their deaths, their awareness of impending doom artificially enhanced to Dantean proportions.
All of these advancements will contribute to the popularity and necessity of our field. Philosophers, psychologists, and technical communicators will combine research in order to find new ways to conceive of ever-increasing amounts of information. There will be great debates regarding whether information should be conceived of spatially or in other ways, and religious wars will begin anew as the population revels in its newly-found capacity for retrieving data about the physical world. Unfortunately, this factual knowledge will often be mistaken for wisdom.
Documentation on this growing universe of data will begin to make suggestions as to how to make sense of it all, including new epistemological paradigms. Some suggestions will be quite good, and will take on the role of religion in the business side of life. Most suggestions will reference ancient memory techniques, such as the Renaissance Art of Memory (based largely on classical myth and technique). Great sections of the industrialized world will re-discover linking two-letter mnemonic devices with images. But the great difference between these future sages and those of the past will be networked computer technology. Combining computer input with mnemonic devices may actually bring about the kind of memory devices of which the ancients dreamed. For the first time ever, software will be written to help people remember things—not databases to be maintained and mined by experts, but software which, once oriented to the individual, will keep us from wondering what it is that’s on the tips of our tongues.
The interfaces for these programs will be developed specifically by technical communicators. The background software for such a personal database already exists; what we lack is two things: (a) a suitable interface combining images, definitions, personal dates and other information, and (b) truly mobile computing devices. When these things happen, and begin to function smoothly, we will no longer be in such a rush to develop an artificial intelligence. Instead, we will become AIs ourselves.
The social forces driving these developments will come about based on a need to manage our information (true, we have this much information today, but most of us don’t yet realize it and we certainly don’t have mobile computing technology which can take advantage of it) and an ancient misconception—that the ability to retrieve data is the same thing as wisdom.
Our social perception of value will begin to change, but not so much that it won’t be recognizable by current standards. Celebrities will have access to powerful information warehouses which they can take with them wherever they go, and they will be known for this rather than for their cars, houses, etc. Ironically, this will lead to some of the most wonderful malapropisms in history, as actors and athletes attempt to make use of thesauri and history books simultaneously. Politicians, on the other hand, will begin to break into new camps based on how information is conceived and retrieved. The great debates over public policy will become ever more complex as all the participants are able to continually retrieve historical and economic data, but will do so in different manners for the sake of rhetorical structure. Some will realize the rhetorical nature of their acts; others will not, and will simply mistake data for data, rather than a complex rhetoric of what happened according to a particular knowledge paradigm.
This shift in value and knowledge perception is important in that it drives (both in the past and in the future) how we perceive of technology. As value and knowledge move closer together into a single idea trait, we will develop technology which is increasingly individualized. Though for millennia we have had professionals who tailor clothing for the wealthy individual, for the first time we’ll have computers tailored in the same way. Computers will be designed specifically to recall knowledge and deliver it in pre-determined time formats, with certain social situations calling for a pause in delivery to simulate reflection. Our perception of knowledge/value will mean personalized interfaces. The very wealthy will have interfaces designed specifically for the individual; the poorer among us will buy pre-packaged interfaces which will have a number of options, and then allow for adaptation based on personal use. Some of us will program our own, and the interface designer will become a celebrity in his/her own right.
And here is where technical communication will reach its zenith, though perhaps by another name. We live, currently, in an information age which has only recently shifted out of the factory floor and into the home office. While our devices are powerful, often startlingly so, they are not so portable as they will be in the near future. When portability reaches the stage at which a wealthy patron can stroll the streets, equipped with all the computing resources of a university but with none of the trappings and limitations, technical communicators will be called into service in great numbers to help the soi-disant intelligentsia make sense of their data.
