Sneak seldom knows what might lie in next week’s diary, so is suitably impressed by BT futurologists Ian Nield and Ian Pearson, who have gone public with their technology forecasts for the next 46 years. Apart from proving that if you want to be a futurologist it helps to be called Ian, the two have demonstrated that, in the age-old tradition of fairground gypsies, it pays to deliver your predictions in as complicated a manner as possible if you want to seem impressive.
In place of a dark tent suffused with incense, a crystal ball, the flash of ringed fingers and swirl of taffeta scarves, BT has opted for a dark Flash animation with swirling coloured lines and a load of balls: little coloured circles that, when clicked, unfurl into a fortune-cookie-like forecast. Never mind that the complete tally of actual predictions could be written down quite succinctly on half a sheet of paper.
Oddly, given that the pair work for BT, their predictions stretch far into the future for topics like machine input/output (2049: “Brain downloads”), but for telecommunications the duo can see only as far as 2008: “HDTV over broadband”.
Either the pair expect BT to move out of telecoms and into brain-bottling, or they’re keeping their firm’s powder very dry indeed.

22 Aug 2005