Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.
istock_stevanovicigor

Back to the future with Peter Cochrane

by
3rd Jul 2013
Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

John Stokdyk experienced an unsettling sense of déjà vu at the recent Cloud World Forum in London.

Nearly 20 years ago when I was a mainstream technology hack I interviewed Dr Peter Cochrane, who was then chief technology officer and  head of research for telecoms giant BT.

Having made a name for himself as a provocative thinker and picked up an OBE for services to telecoms research, Cochrane has moved on to the global consultancy circuit. So I was looking forward to catching up with him again at the Cloud World Forum last week and hearing how his views have adapted to the rise of the net.

Unfortunately his outlook was pretty bleak. “The internet does not scale. It will not service our future demands. Not only is it uneconomic, it’s not sustainable or ecologically sensible,” Cochrane announced as he took the stage.

“If we look at the economics of the net and keep growing it, ultimately it doesn’t work.”

For individuals, the internet and mobile technologies also mean an end to the era of sitting at a desk is coming to an end, he continued. Work, home life and leisure are all blending into a continuum, but people are having trouble adapting.

“I don’t know anyone who can keep up in their profession with all the information that hits their screens.”

Turning his attention to industry, Cochrane commented that businesses could not continue to dig resources and minerals out of the earth, melting them down and then chucking what’s left into a hole. “We need to recover materials and act responsibly in relation to ecology… We’ve got to get to a world where we use materials and return them to the manufacturing cycle,” he said.

Many of the strategies being pursued by business and  government did not make sense from an engineering point of view, he argued, which is why we end up with wind farms that generate power intermittently, but with no way to store the electricity. “There’s virtually no investment in storage. We generate it and don’t use it.”

The next big policy mistake is already well under way, helped along by Chancellor George Osborne’s enthusiasm to encourage shale oil exploration with tax incentives.

“Fracking and shale oil only postpone the day we run out of oil,” Cochrane snorted. “Our leaders have obviously never done a course on systems or thermodynamics.”

After this almost apocalyptic tirade, I reminded Peter of our previous interview and asked him if the intervening years had really turned him into such a pessimist.

“I am an optimist. I believe that technology can only make things better,” he told me. “But the question is - can we do it fast enough?”

Tags:

Replies (0)

Please login or register to join the discussion.

There are currently no replies, be the first to post a reply.