Whilst the social and business system will be a key factor in the development of ICT, new technologies will have major impacts. The generational shift to users and buyers who have grown up with ICT enabled communications and entertainment will facilitate the adoption of such technologies. Whilst it is difficult to predict the precise nature of the changes, most managers and decision makers now accept that technological change has been rapid over the last two decades. It is also apparent that there are varying degrees of planning in the context of change or planning to maximise the potential benefits of technological change. It may be constructive to reflect on where we have come in the last two decades in a technological sense and where we might be in 2030 and beyond.

The first programmable computers were developed in about the 1930s, although a high level programming language as we know it was not developed until the 1950s (FORTRAN). ARPANet, the original Internet was started in 1969. The first personal computers were developed in 1976/77 (Apple, TRS-89 and Commodore). The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and Microsoft Windows in 1985. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, (CERN) proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web (www) in 1991, was based on hypertext - a system of embedding links in text to link to other text. In 1991, user-friendly interfaces to the Internet were developed (gopher, Veronica, Jughead) and then in 1993 the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web was developed (Mosaic). Since then the Internet and the Web have developed at an astonishing rate with a plethora of applications and services being added. At this point, we are on the verge of seeing our current computing and communication devices converge with a whole range of appliances as the age of pervasive and ubiquitous computing dawns.

The year 2006 was celebrated as the 50 ^th anniversary of the beginning of the field known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). When Alan Turing first openly proposed ideas of AI in the 1950s, they were almost considered absurd. Today we live in a world where machines are able to beat humans at chess. Whenever we take off or land at Sydney airport, the landing control is carried out by artificial agents capable of doing a better job than that of humans.

Not only are machines reaching high levels of capability in terms of what they can do in a task sense, but we, as ordinary people, are living in a society that is ever more reliant on them for safe, efficient and effective management of our complex systems. Even without very great scientific and technological breakthroughs, it is anticipated that the processing power of computers will reach that of the human brain (16k inferences/s) by 2030 (the horizon of this strategy). Will that mean, for instance that we would be able to have humanoid robots equal to our human capabilities by that time? This is unlikely, simply because it is unlikely that we will be able to co-ordinate, structure and integrate this processing power at such a level. However, in parallel, the rate at which knowledge is being gained about the functioning of the human brain, for example, through functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) studies, which use radio waves and a strong magnetic field to provide clear and detailed pictures of internal organs and tissues, may assist some of these breakthroughs to be made.

Only recently, Honda has been able to build a humanoid robot that is able to walk, run and jump like a human being. Whilst this is quite an achievement in robotics, other approaches through the notion of embodied systems are already promising to make this possible in a much simpler way, and requiring far less processing power in a central 'brain'. It is therefore conceivable that by 2050 not only will machines be able to defeat humans at chess but that teams of humanoid robots will be able to defeat the best human teams in games such as soccer and football.

Over the last two decades, the connectivity of computing devices has grown to a level that allows global information networks. These have underpinned the development of social networks, and with emerging sensor technologies will allow more sophistication in terms of being able to gather information on the environment, in particular water, on people's state of health, and on human activity. The Internet itself has evolved as a layered system, and work on the reasoning layer has already started with the initial efforts on the Semantic Web. The security layer is also receiving considerable attention, as its importance to the continued credibility of Internet commerce is critical.