Professor of IT Fergus O'Brien is concerned that society is trapped in a 'permanent present', where the past and future are only 3 years away.

Professor O'Brien said technology marketplaces tend to be commodity driven and therefore have no history and no future.

"We are being squeezed into decision-making based on a 6-year time window ... and the window of time is shrinking," he said.

This 'point of time' view of the computing and telecommunications domain can be contrasted with the rapid increase in long-term data storage required for scientific and industrial research and development, where long-term means at least 50 years.

The Central Queensland University Professor said corporations were actively rejecting 'dated knowledge' and there was pressure for research to pay off in only 3 years.

Professor O'Brien said knowledge was being lost and society had now to rediscover and re-invent solutions. Emails (now so important as records) were only kept for 3 years and information systems were subject to complete rollover every 5 years.

Meanwhile, politics and marketplaces dictated a 3-year research, development and production cycle, where planning horizons were conflated to 18 months, market lifetimes were down to 3 years and individual commodities lasted only a year.

The Professor called for debate on alternative futures, including long-term problem resolution and the enabling of raw data mining for at least 10 years.

He said magnetic media storage lasted only 5 years and reading technology only 3 years, compared to 50 years for microfilm and 1000 years for paper.

Professor O'Brien said SMS and other pressures on literacy meant humans may only have another 50 years of reading literacy.

"We need to draw back the curtains and open up the time window to survive," he said.