As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
The problem with this prediction is the way it is couched – with such a definite timescale. As if these things were ever certain.
Anyone who works within a large, slow-moving institution, struggling still to deal with the first slew of problems thrown up by the invention of the World Wide Web, might think about the pace of decision-making in their organisation and wonder whether it will even be possible to sneak biometric authentication onto a meeting agenda within five years, let alone get it adopted.
A useful exercise when attempting to predict the future is to look back five years and see what were the innovations that made a difference within that time frame. Off the top of my head I would say Twitter, Facebook, smartphones: all these things have decisively changed our lives in this period (only one of them a hardware innovation, interestingly). But I can also think of a much longer list of things that didn’t – virtual worlds, mobile learning (only just getting going, though talked about at conferences for 10 years at least) and, dare I say it, the Semantic Web.
IBM are certainly not out on a limb here. Gartner’s hype curve (see graphic below), which we have mentioned before on this blog, puts biometric authentication methods at two to five years away from mainstream adoption (though mainstream adoption is not the same thing as never needing a password again).
And the pain point this technology addresses is certainly a big one. Many of us are driven half demented by the plethora of pin numbers, security codes, password and ‘memorable information’ questions we have to juggle on a daily basis.
Reinforcing this last point, David Nahamoo, IBM Fellow and Speech CTO, says, ‘Personally, I have a very difficult time remembering more than 50 account log-ins and passwords that I have.’ Personally, I have a mare of a time remembering more than three (but then I’m not a super-brainy IBMer). Luckily there are apps to do it for you, which being a lot cheaper than a hardware solution might possibly slow adoption somewhat. I wonder whether IBM factored little things like that into their prediction of five years?
The truth is, the period of five years is fairly arbitrary; chosen to make a snappy headline. And that, ultimately, is what makes the whole 5 in 5 campaign, an annual event now, strangely retro. With its slackwitted optimism (mobile phones will eradicate world poverty – yeah right) it can’t help but remind oldsters like me of Tomorrow’s World and the Eagle comic – in the days when they used to tell us that come the future we would all ride around on jet packs and eat roast dinners in pill form. Cars would run on water: of course they would. Well the future arrived, but my personal jet pack didn’t.
Come off it, IBM.