In the year 2036….

Last week US publication Network World published an article listing 25 ways in which IT will morph in the next 25 years. This featured notions such as storage becoming cheap enough for you to record every minute of your life and robots outnumbering humans in developed countries.

If the geeks quoted in Network World’s article are right, by the year 2036, all entertainment will be streamed in 3D via your smartphone, making Blu-Ray the last removable media format ever made. Our grandkids will have no idea what a CD or DVD is and on top of this, everything ever created will be available online, making Libraries disappear and books something to be seen in a museum.

This may seem a little extreme to some, but it got us thinking again about how many jobs will be available to the kids of today which don’t even exist yet. When I was in primary school, back in the early nineties, I remember my school buying two ‘Apple Mac’s’ which were subsequently shared between the entire school. I think I got to use one once! Nowadays, with widespread broadband uptake and the ever increasing influence of social media, schools are having to educate children for roles that don’t currently exist.

I.T. has always had its role models in Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like. However, as far as I am aware, these guys never had blockbuster films made about them. Not to the extent of Mark Zuckerberg anyway, who’s rise to fame was documented in the 2010 hit film ‘The Social Network’.

The meteoric impact of social media has given rise to a whole new generation of computer nerds wanting to be the next Zuckerberg. With this in mind, how long will it be before children are coming home from school and telling their parents that they want to be Content Hyperpersonalisers, Augmented Reality Engineers and Social Media Strategists when they grow up?