If you are a professional in technology, government and/or business you have no doubt already been exposed to the very interesting Marc Andreessen.
Odds are many of our readers are already tracking his thoughts closely via his blog, his media interactions captured on YouTube and his very dynamic and thought engaging Twitter Feed where you can now track the dynamics of what he finds interesting day to day.
But have you ever wanted to dive deeper into Marc’s views on the future of technology as it relates to government services?
I had an opportunity to ask Marc a few questions and decided to focus on this topic in the hopes that the resulting discussion could prove to be informative to government technologists and the citizen thought leaders helping to shape the future of government to citizen interaction. The result was a series of five posts which may prove to be informative to your strategic planning.
With this first post, we do some scene setting discussion on what they world may be like 15 years from now and solicit Marc’s context:
Gourley: Marc, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the future technological environment with a focus on lessons for today’s government technologist. Your views on the contributions of new technologies to the future of government-citizen interactions would be most appreciated, as well as your views on the use of technologies that can help the government do its job better.
Andreessen: Sounds great.
Gourley: As a planning assumption, consider a future environment 15 years out. Projections are that by the year 2030 there will be 370 Million Americans, so not so much more than we have today. Imagine all of those citizens having access to all the compute power of highly evolved intelligent cloud-based and personal IT solutions and consider a world where cyber and physical systems have been deeply connected and where sensors abound. Assume bandwidth is available where ever it needs to be. Assume citizens are already being served with many benefits of this technology that governments used to provide. Do you think this is a plausible future? What would you add?
Andreessen: Could be a realistic scenario. It is certainly in keeping with our views. Some of the assumptions we (a16z) operate under is that we are just now getting a glimpse of a world where everyone will be online. The computer itself is only 70 years old, and only 7 years ago did the PC allow the first billion people to get online. Smartphones blew through that record, hitting 1.5 billion in 2013 and on track to reach the entire global population of 7 Billion by 2020. The price of smartphones is dropping fast and we may actually reach that number much earlier.
So it is very realistic to say that by 2030 people around the world will have lived in an age of smartphones for a full decade. So these people will have a decade of experience living with a supercomputer in their pocket. Citizens will no doubt be comfortable using these devices for applications that touch every aspect of their lives, including how they transact business, how they organize and how they collaborate, and that will impact how they interact with government.
We also expect the cloud revolution will be fully implemented by then, including people confidently accessing trusted cloud based applications and data. Consider this not just here but extrapolated to everyone in the world. Everyone on the planet will have access into social networks, ecommerce, cloud based calculation services/algorithms, enhanced education and news and information. Everyone will have this everywhere.
Now that we have done some scene setting, our next post in this series will dive into services the government provides now and in the future and what to expect as citizens become more digitally interactive, with other posts to follow on ways automation, robotics, and AI can impact government service and the social fabric of interactions between citizens and government. Ensure you are on our newsletter distributions to be alerted when we publish.
