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THE FUTURE LOOKS SMART
In every sector, 2020 brought about the loss of predictability. Businesses of all kinds were driven online at an unprecedented rate. Caroline Oswald (nee Legg, Central High, Class of 2000), Director of Business Development at Revlifter, an award-winning e-commerce personalisation platform, recently presented at our NHSG Inspiring Alumnae Business Networking Group. Caroline has carved a highly successful career in creatively-led technology and is uniquely placed to give us an insight into what the future of technology looks like and the impact it will have in the workplace and home. If you asked me 20 years ago whether I expected a seismic shift in the technology that we use every single day, I would have been a little disbelieving. Modem dial-ups; dong, dong, bing, bing, beeeeeeeeeeep... were still very fresh in my mind. Having three television channels hadn’t faded from my memory. Searching through a 32-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica to find an answer for my homework to this day holds fond and vivid memories (I can still smell the beautiful books). I got my first email address in GCSE IT at CNHS and what a faff it was to access it, not to mention the queue for the shared computers (a little ironic seeing as some of the aforementioned are, in themselves, seismic shifts in technology). So how did we get to where we are, via Teletext Bamboozle, 7K games of Snake on the Nokia 3210, at least 7K tangled videotapes, the very first (rather chunky)
iPod, and the moment you realised it would take at least two hours to decide what to watch on Netflix (even after using the power of social media and asking your ‘friends’ to guide you)? Well, in my case, it hasn’t felt like major step-change overnight and truth be told, I am a little disappointed that we are nowhere near the Jean Paul Gaultier wardrobe and flying taxis depicted in The Fifth Element (we have a few years yet, it was portraying 2263). I am sure some of you
reading this disagree and there is a huge amount of discomfort with the abundance of technology in our lives now, my only defence is that I am a child of one of the very few 1970s Computer Science graduates, so I was immersed from birth. If you ask me now, do I expect to see a seismic shift in the technology we use every single day in 20 years? My answer would be quick and bold in response, without a shadow of a doubt!
