Future Visions to support Knowledge Flows

Last night I went to a concert with an African singer named Fatoumata Diawara who grew up in Mali. She sang in her native Mali language and announced in English and French. With dance and gitarre songs and a band she really put on a great lively show. But at one point my thoughts started to wander - sorry Fatou, maybe due to the somewhat repeated African rhythm - and I had to think of some future developments. It started with a thought of how it would be great to understand what she was really singing about and ended with some visions what the future might have to offer to us (and/or our children) - from a technology as well as a KM point of view.

With translation technologies going new ways (like crowd-sourcing translation or statistical translation), I think we definitely will make big strides in that area and with computing power, storage sizes and connectivity speeds will continue to rise, I actually think one of the dramtic things we will see is "on-the-fly translation", i.e. you might have a mini-headset that you speak German into and the person across from you will receive immediate and quite accurate translation into their ear-piece. The same will be true with communication via the internet. You chat or skype with somebody in Japan and everything you type or say will be simultaneusly translated for the other party. That doesn't mean there will be no foreign languages anymore, but you have a choice, whether you want to learn one to communicate.

Just like Arthur C Clarke predicted in 1964, that in our times we will be able to speak to anybody on the planet with a push of a button, I am predicting that simultaneous translation will open up a new ball-game. Also for knowledge flows in organizations. As translation will usually not be necessary anymore, searching and text analytics (another area that will have matured) will be able to go across languages.

This will be a huge culturual change as (while we have languages that get spoken across the world), the barrier of language is still very much a reality. Communicating with anybody in the world is possible as long as we do understand each other, but simultaneous translation will add another level of communication. Will it automatically mean that we do understand each other culturally? No, I would not go that far, but a bit of culture travels in the language and the more we cross-communicate and collaborate the better the chance some of that understanding gets passed as well. And the focus can actually move from language training to cultural training.

While I was at it, my thoughts wandered to a few more visions, that I see coming. A couple of years ago I saw Tim Berners-Lee (the key person behind the Internet) at Babson college presenting his ideas around the semantic map. And some of that is already being implemented (like semantic Wikis), and some of is happening without us realizing it. But for a real "understanding" exchange it just needs that metadata. One of the barriers for the semantic web to really take over in my mind is that SOMEBODY needs to put the effort in in categorizing, adding the "meaning" and "context" to the data and information that is being stored. There is a certain level of automatism that can happen and will happen I am sure, but some of the real valuable "metadata" will still come from humans. What I think will happen in that area are two things:

1. the use of crowd-sourcing (getting the input of the many)
2. the better integration of metadata generating interfaces for humans to use.

The first one will make it possible to cover the immense need of categorization, and the wide spread needed to make the automatic interaction between content possible. The second will enable the input of human intelligence. Providing context is effort, but once we can get to minimize that level people will actually do it.

The third thing that we will have in not too far future are widespread holographic images. Those have been around for some time, but it seems that we are getting closer. In Frank Schätzing's novel "Limit" one of the women living in a space station has her own holographic avatar which is a full body image of her that walks the room with a selection of dresses to choose from (and she can immediately order what she likes for custom production). This is only one way holographics might be used. But just like the recently hyped 3D-printing the idea is to transport 3D across distance and to me it seems the logical next step from the 2D digital transport that we are currently at.

I am fairly confident that those things will become a reality, maybe sooner as we think, as some of it seems to be possible in the lab already, and with the right killer-app these things could get the funding they need - just like iPhone and iPad finally made touch and multi-touch a wide-spread reality.

What do you think? What is your favourite vision for how knowledge work could evolve in the centuries to come?