This section attempts to provide a view of some of the future developments that might affect the topics discussed in this tutorial. The developments that are outlined are based only on general reading not detailed research; however, hopefully they indicate the broad direction of travel. Readers should be aware that, after writing sections 1-5 of this tutorial, but before starting on this section 6, I deliberately read ‘Homo Deus’ by Yuval Noah Harari in order to give me an up to date basis of where the technology is headed. The book gave me far more than that – it also provides an insight into what we are and why we do things. Several of its ideas have found their way into this section of the tutorial.
This view of the impact of future development on OFC is in the four parts listed below. First it considers what will happen to the things that are fundamental to OFC projects – the items themselves. Second, it assesses the impact of developments that are occurring today; and then it looks at the impact of the dominant coming technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Finally, the overall impact of all these developments is summarised.
U6.1 The future of OFC items and collections
U6.2 The future impact of recent developments
U6.3 The future impact of AI
U6.4 A summary view of the OFC future