In a world where the only permanence is change, niches open up for self-styled techie gurus like the grandiosely named George W. Welles III from Minnetonka, Minnesota. A retired Broadband Applications Manager for US West Communications, Welles now runs his own "virtual corporation", Imaging Futures, Inc. He recently visited Dubliner Keith Nolan to sniff out applications for the latter's infrared digital camera - a Kodak prototype, and apparently one of only two of its type in existence.
A 57-year-old "Apple bigot" in a suit, with a snow-white thatch over monitor-burn eyes, Welles may seem an unlikely man to be quasi-humoristically drawling on about intranets and firewalls, the shift from electronics to photonics, galloping bandwidths, retinal-projection displays, smart sensors in the skin of aircraft, or human area networks. . .
But his low-key presentation in Latchford's Bistro restaurant in Dublin was an intriguing and broad-ranging affair, illustrated with wow-factor anecdotes about developments in quantum computing (which he insists will be here by 2005) - or even wackier DNA computing experiments using rat neurons - heady technophilic stuff which had the futurology geeks in the front row perspiring and nodding in unison.
Welles: "But I don't claim to be a futurologist. Anyone who tells you they can predict the future is either lying or deluded or both. I'm just in the business of helping people develop a vision of what the changes are likely to be."
What seems even more unlikely is that apart from helping companies such as USA Today and Hallmark Cards to develop Web sites, he is called in to give pep talks in Intel and, believe it or not, Microsoft.
"Those presentations are on a much more intense level than this one in Dublin - that was just a package-opener. I typically come in with just under a ton of equipment - it depends on what the company can provide. With Intel or Microsoft I come in with a few hand-held devices even they haven't seen before: maybe a smart card with four megs of processing power; or a personal full-colour visual system you can run off an Amiga - protoypes which never go to manufacture. The idea is to move people out of their comfort zone, and give them an inkling of what's coming. I don't come with a corporate bias, I just digest information and trends, and give them a coherence."
For really big contracts - major corporations and even military clients - he pulls in team resources such as digital imaging experts from Northrop Grumman, or, if a company needs a strong security analysis, a former head of Secure Communications for the National Security Agency. "The virtual corporation is almost like a medieval guild - you have your specialists, and when it makes sense, you come together for a project, and then split."
So how did he end up in this game - as a hacker on DARPAnet? He chuckles drily. "Back in the Seventies, I flew a lot of aircraft - civilian and military (F-102s and others) - and I did a lot of work in telecommunications. I helped to found the Digital Imaging Symposium for the US Department of Defense at the US Airforce Academy in Colorado Springs, which was kind of a lifelong dream." He also won several international awards in electronic media as far back as 1986, when he presented an early high-end digital imaging course in Chicago - "this was at a time when no one even knew what a CD-Rom was." Now he's enjoying early retirement as an international consultant, travelling light with "a Mac in a big anvil case, with a fivegigabyte hardrive, 84 megs of RAM (and three ultrawide SCSI busses) - although I'm thinking of turning it in for something faster."
Citing sources like the Journal Of Applied Physics - "It's a real pity that, for a general audience, quantum mechanics has such a huge glaze-over factor" - he keeps abreast by spending about five hours a day researching online. Some of his futurology is standard business-magazine fare - "85 per cent of the world's wealth now exists as bits" - or dumbed-down Marshall McLuhan epigrams like "Trying to predict the future by looking to the past is like driving a car forward while staring in the rear view mirror," but a lot of it makes perfect, straightforward sense.
"Significant products traditionally were developed for, as we call it, the `black' side of the defence world or the space programme," he says, "for people who had no budgets, in other words huge budgets. Nobody ever knew about these technologies until they came over to the `red', or visible side - highend business and early adaptors - before ever reaching the basic consumer. "Nowadays, it's the customers who are driving for functionality, and companies are trying to figure out how to give it to them at an affordable price. People are beginning to embrace technology almost to excess, particularly in the States, but also in South-East Asia, parts of Europe, the Middle East. . ."
Meanwhile, anyone worried about an uncertain future in which national, corporate and personal espionage will be rife, and encryption will become impossible - or just seeking to bone up on prevailing views on breakthroughs in biomechanics at MIT and Los Alamos; spectrum allocation; photochromic data storage; writable DVD; wearable computers; full colour/motion 3D-volumetric displays on SGI workstations, etc, etc - can try out his prowess by looking for a free consultation on gwelles@mn.uswest.net
Mic Moroney is at: micmoroney@hotmail.com