Key points:

• Automation of office work would eventually save costs equivalent to 60% of the economy.
• Truly useful speech recognition would open up the information economy to 3 billion people.

• The world’s oceans are the next environment computer scientists will try to automate.

According to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, in the go-go world of high technology, “Four years is the closest thing to a lifetime that we can anticipate. It’s at least one major computing revolution.” So what, then, is the point of a computer conference that happens only once every four years?

At the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), it is precisely the infrequency of their events that allows attendees to step back and see the flow of technology’s progress, rather than tunnel-visioning in on whatever the latest advance happens to be. ACM lends perspective on a grand scale to an industry that lives and dies by quarterly earnings announcements.

TED at the Ivory Tower

The first ACM event, ACM97, tackled the almost ludicrous task of forecasting how the next 50 years of computing would take shape. This time, ACM1 imagined a world “Beyond Cyberspace” --- that is, a world where the Internet is so thoroughly ingrained into our global society that it fades, quite literally, into the woodwork. Speakers included user interface pioneer Alan Kay, speech recognition technologist Raymond Kurzweil, inventor Dean Kamen, and “father of the Internet” Vincent Cerf. There were many soul-stirring presentations, giving the conference a TED-like touch. (See “Fireworks for the Mind,” our coverage of TED 11.)

Marcia McNutt, CEO of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, discussed the potential to mass-engineer the world’s waters in a bid to transform them from hunting ground to global pasture. As an example, she described “Robo Tuna” (“the ultimate underwater autonomous vehicle”), which would shepherd fishing stock from feeding ground to feeding ground, thus making possible simultaneous growth of the world’s fish population with sustainable harvesting.

Of course, if you can herd fish around with Robo Tuna, you can also use it to drive them into developed countries’ nets and deprive poor nations of yet one more resource. “Because the oceans are global, the solutions must be global, too,” said McNutt. And what about potential environmental disaster? Do we dare engineer the oceans anyway? In one of several instant polls taken at each session, 73% of conference attendees, made up largely of academics in computer science and engineering, voted to go ahead.

Putting the “World” into the World Wide Web

Lest anyone think that the Net is entirely old news, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science director Michael Dertouzos reminded the audience that e-commerce currently represents only 1% of the U.S. economy, and the so-called “World Wide Web” touches less than 5% of the world’s population.

The focus of his computer lab at MIT is on developing new architectures that emphasize speech, vision, automation of basic office functions, access to information based on meaning, and collaboration over space and time. With low-level office work now representing roughly 60% of costs in the economy --- some $14 trillion worth --- automating and/or redeploying office work to workers in developing countries over the global Internet could achieve productivity gains like those delivered by the Industrial Revolution, said Dertouzos. And consider what will happen when truly useful speech recognition opens the door to information for the roughly 1 billion people who use ideogram-based writing, or the 2 billion people who can’t read or write at all.

Tomorrow Today

Running concurrently with the conference, the ACM1 Expo felt like Disney’s Tomorrowland. It featured about 70 technology displays, mainly from universities, although some companies showed off their latest R&D. The talk of the Expo was “Smart Dust,” a University of California at Berkeley project to develop single-chip devices that walk, fly, and float on their own. (There’s a link to Smart Dust here.)

ACM1 was home court for the academic set, and there were scant few VCs, CEOs, or business development people in sight. Though speeches were long and sometimes boring, ACM1 pretty much gave the straight skinny on the future of technology, without the application of corporate reality distortion fields. Your next chance to encounter such a rare treasure trove is in 2005, when ACM5 takes place. Enter it in your Palm Pilot --- but don’t expect to be using that technology by then.

Richard Landry is principal of richmedium (richmedium@pacbell.net) a new media strategic consulting firm.