No nation a midget - in Digiworld

Photo: Liis Treimann

Stephen Prentice, main speaker at international info and communication event – Estonian ICT Week 2014 – kicked off this Wednesday, described the total change in world of today brought about by technology. And how it just keeps picking up speed.

In his mind, Estonia’s role in the world is in our very hands.

You make a living by fortunetelling – will there be a day that Estonia is rich and famous, thanks to its technology firms?

(Laughs) That’s a good question. You do have the chance. With technology, we tend to only think about computers, services, programming. The trends that I currently see are wider – robotics, artificial intelligence. These are more sophisticated, but also more influential than what’s merely happening in info and communications technology.

Whether Estonia’ll be rich and famous is in your own hands. You have potential, you definitely have taken an interest. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of misunderstanding regarding how a small country can do big things. Ask an average person in Europe, or better yet in USA: where is Estonia located? Probably, they’ll have difficulty telling you. In the digital age, however, the physical and the digital are being separated – you being physically in the Baltic region will not mean you can’t be digitally involved in people’s lives all around the world. I think that’s the most liberating thing.

At the same time, it does trouble the big states. We are living in a world where Internet has blurred the state borders. This, however, has made national identity more important for people.

So if you are operating on somebody else’s territory, they feel you are intruders; they will want to get rid of you or to put higher taxes on you.

Should enterprises in small states focus on niche products?

Definitely not. I wouldn’t say the technology world is very big. There are the large companies, but they are doing rather similar stuff. I think that, today, technology companies are too much into small things, not into solving problems in society. Sure it’s important to help companies make the processes more effective, but at the same time technology has the capacity to build a better tomorrow. But with fixing the world, there will always be the question of who pays, as investments need to be earned back.

Start-ups and boosters provide for lots of ideas, regarding which the large companies say this is a toy, this is irrelevant, this will never be big. We said the same regarding personal computers, mobile phones, tablets. Still today, nobody may need the tablet computers, but that will not mean they won’t buy these. Today, the future always feels insignificant.

The issue is how to find money for ideas like these. This is where crowd financing comes in. This means individuals who are willing to invest small sums into an idea that sparks their imagination.

But do you know of any Estonian technology company?

I do have to admit I don’t know these directly Estonian. There’s always Skype, but I should know more.

How does the development of technology affect our jobs?

The greatest problem is technology speeding up a company’s life cycle. Half of the Fortune 500 top companies weren’t there five-ten years ago. That, in my mind, serves to show how short-lived a company’s success may be.

We’ve seen that in the IT sector – at the beginning of 1990ies there were 93 computer companies. By the end of the decade, there three. The others just disappeared. That means companies must constantly update themselves.

Currently, technology plays a vital role in any company. The constant need for innovation, which has spurred the technology sector, will be spurring all sectors. That means that if you think you are able to keep the competitive edge, you are doomed. If you think you can grow the company 30 years more without doing anything differently, you’re wrong. With jobs, that’ll mean your job is not guaranteed if you do not change. You can’t expect to be doing the same job, in 30 years, that you’re doing today. In high likelihood, the job just won’t exist.

It’s interesting what we’ll see, looking back at development of technology in 2040. Will the development of technology have made our lives better, or will it have destroyed all our jobs and made life worse?

Both could happen. Because technology does destroy jobs, like the printing press did, and the industrial revolution. As a rule, technology has also created new jobs, but this time the issue will be if people will cope with these – will they have skills and knowhow enough?

Five years ago, nobody guessed smartphones would become such a natural part of human life. What will be the next new technology, the use of which we can’t even imagine at the moment?

Looking into the near future – which is all we can do, today – then the next development is wearable technology. Technology will literally settle into the clothing that we wear so we won’t even notice it any more. Google’s glasses is a good example.

It is known that certain products or services will mean a total turnaround it they are banned before becoming available in reality. As happened with the Google glasses. Will that hinder their spread? Certainly not. There is absolutely no way to stop these from spreading.

With wearable technology it will be that as it becomes ever smaller, it will be ever harder to notice. Up to now, we are still dependant on devices, but what we actually need s the services the devices offer – the apps, the possibility to post something etc. As the focus shifts from devices to services, we will see an explosion of applications that are independent of devices. Right now, we are in the experimenting phase. Even Samsung, Google and Apple are not sure what the future will bring.

Would it be possible, provided the desire, to slow or hinder the development of technology some other way?

No, not a chance. You can do it, but that won’t mean your competitor will. You may opt not to have a Facebook account – there’s very many good cases for that. But that will not hinder all the others from doing that. Even on a state level it may be decided that we will not do stem cell research, but that won’t stop other states from doing that. The whole world may agree not to send robots to war in our place, but what will hinder terrorists from doing that? It cannot be stopped, one has to learn to live with it.

The fact is: development of technology is speeding up, not slowing down. Nothing lasts forever, of course. Probably, in 2025–2035 we will be facing a fundamental change as the silicon-based computers’ time is up and a new generation of technology will emerge, which will probably be NDA-based biotechnology. That will slow the development for a while, as it will be costly and knowledge-intensive.