In the movie Back to the Future 2, Marty McFly travels to 10 June 2015 – where Doc Brown promises that "where we’re going, we don’t need roads."

Perhaps we don’t have mass production hovercars yet and today’s yesterday wasn’t yesterday’s tomorrow but the future thinkers at this week’s Cisco Live rolled out some big predictions.

Here are five we don’t nesessarily agree with but which we found mindblowing.

1. There will be a marketplace for insight (Joseph Bradley, IoE Evangelist)

"Everybody’s talking about insight. In order to get insight, you have to be able to have a marketplace of knowledge, a marketplace of information. Knowledge is like any other asset. If I want to drive insight, where can I go to retrieve it? Where can I go to know it exists, how can I acquire it?

"The idea of this information marketplace will be born, where you have a location where you can go and get access to information and know the value of information. Ultimately this will solve the personal information paradox. Consumers want to get a personalised experience, but they don’t want people knowing too much about them.

2. Our digital persona will become more important than our physical presence (Bradley)

"Our digital exhaust…everything we use is becoming digitalised…can you imagine a world where they get your digital persona wrong? Your digital persona will become a reflection of how the world sees you: what information you get, what jobs you’re presented with. If you think about how impersonal your typical credit score is, now your digital persona will give much more insight into who you really are."

3. Security will accelerate the Internet of Everything (Bradley)

"Everybody says that security is one of the challenges associated with the IoE – it’s going to slow this thing down. Protecting data centres will be as important as protecting borders, no doubt about it.

"But when you think about the IoE and the value – that $19 trillion of corporate profits- one thing a lot of people won’t talk about is that 49 percent of that is transfer of profit between one enterprise and another, not incremental. The stakes are high, and what I see security doing is not slowing down the IoE, but raising stake. If you get it right, they’re going to come to you, and if you get it wrong, you’re going to pay very very dearly.

 

4. The era of large corporations being humbled by start ups in innovation is over (Kate O’Keeffe, Lead, Cisco Hyper-Innovation Living Labs andFuture of Innovation)

"Our relationship with start ups will change as we move into the future. If we think about the Big Data era, it’s very difficult for a startup to have the same level of access to the data and the analytics that we have as large corporations.

"Our ability to work with the startup community as well as other corporations in a network way is going to change how we drive the hyper-personalisations that consumers are looking for. The way that we’re going to drive the transformation we need is through greater inclusion of each other as corporations and startups.

 

5. Moore’s Law will achieve a computer approximately the cost of a PC today with the computing power of the human brain (Rowan Trollope, SVP & GM, Cisco Collaboration and Future of work)

"This is absolutely astonishing because we’re not even close to a mouse’s brain today. So the idea that for a thousand dollars you could have in the palm of your hand the compute equivalent of what’s inside your head is fundamental to how we think about the future. Lots of raw compute doesn’t equal intelligence – [it’s about] knowing what questions to ask. So really the future is going to be all about the software."