It’s an old truism: when we visualise the future that lies ahead, we can really only be sure of one thing – it will not be as we imagined. Not even those extremely popular films that became a genre and tried to create a vision of the future quite succeeded.

Take, as one of many examples, “Back to the Future Part II”. This instalment of the incredibly popular 1980s trilogy takes Marty McFly to the year 2015, to a world of flying cars, hoverboards, shoes and clothes that automatically adapt to the wearer’s size and fashion in which the double tie is the norm. At the same time, when you phone someone when you’re in town you do it from a phone box (albeit with a video screen), and the closest they come to the connected society of today is having a fax machine in every room – even in the toilet. For a more detailed list – including the surprising number of things the film got right – take a look here.

You can of course also argue that it is easier to try and predict the future now, precisely because of many of the breakthroughs that were impossible to predict when Back to the Future Part II had its premiere back in 1989. Our digital and social everyday lives, combined with the opportunity to collect and analyse vast amounts of data, mean that we can back up or refute theories about emerging trends more quickly and effectively than before, and at the same time act on them by making the whole world part of the creative process. Social media are now a global meet market in which an international focus group is only a few hours of research and a few clicks away. The question is whether this is enough – and to what extent luck and timing will still be crucial.

The area where the debate on the future is at its most intensive at present is of course when the Internet of Things (IoT) is discussed. All companies in the technology sector have something to say on the subject; everyone wants to surpass everyone else with high-impact visions that could in a way be reminiscent of writing the script for a science fiction film. On the one hand you have those who predict that the IoT will cause a fundamental change in our everyday behaviour; on the other hand there are those who believe that the IoT will primarily change the world by making machines run better, more sustainably and more productively than is the case today. Take the much-cited example of the connected washing machine – is the “thing” the fact that you can control and monitor it remotely or that it adapts its operation based on data about the kind of detergent and the quality of the water in the pipes? Are we talking about interaction or automation?

I don’t claim to be able to predict the future – if I could, I would have sold everything I own and started to finance startups – but one thing I am sure of is that this revolution will creep up on us and will consist of a vast number of very small revolutions – each of which is insignificant on its own and will pass almost unnoticed until one day you look back and realise that you’re living in a different world.

An exciting example of how the IoT can improve the conditions for industrial production also exists in our own customer base – Dundee Precious Metals’ Chelopech mine in Bulgaria installed networks in the mine galleries to connect everything for real-time analysis – the result, to put it in click monster terms, was an absolutely incredible cost saving of 44 per cent per tonne and a doubling of production.

But this is still an example based on an isolated ecosystem. There are obvious challenges in connectivity, communication standards and data security that must make more progress towards a solution before we can start to be more specific about milestones for how the IoT will affect society as a whole. This is why Samsung CEO Boo-Keun Yoon’s statement during the CES trade fair in Las Vegas in January that “I know in my heart that neither one single company nor one industry alone can deliver the benefits of the Internet of Things […] Only if we work together can we improve people’s lives” was far more important than any of the products being launched at the trade fair.

From a manufacturer’s perspective, a successful strategy for the Internet of Things is to create a demand for products – both interaction- and automation-based – that did not even exist before the technical conditions were in place. If we go back to CES for a moment, I was quite impressed by this connected toothbrush from Grush – all that remains is to see whether it will work as promised and to what extent it triggers a demand that will pay back the development cost – but isn’t it a creative use of the Internet of Things?