Imagining The Future

Jessica has a end of semester project in her high school technology class.  She is supposed to describe what her every day computer will be like in the year 2030.

She learned all about Moore's Law in her class and figured out that the PowerPC processor that runs her Powerbook G4 laptop will have more than 2 trillion transistors on it and process over 200 trillion operations per second (way faster than the current world champ the IBM BlueGene which does 70 terraflops).

So she sat down, armed with this information, and started to imagine what she could do with her computer.  She thought about all the logical things, smaller, lighter, smarter, etc.  But she was still stuck in the world she knows; monitors, keyboards, memory chips, wifi, CDs/DVDs, etc.

So I asked her if she thought she could talk to her machine and if it would talk back?

Would she need a keyboard and a mouse if she could do that?

Would she need a monitor if there were $20 flatpanels everywhere that she could use when she needed a monitor?

What if all data could be wirelessly sent in and out of her computer?  Would she need the CD/DVD, the memory?

Would her computer be her phone?

Mind bending stuff for sure.  And I am not sure she wanted her mind bent when she had a project to complete.

Comments

[steve]

perhaps a big change may be that jessica (and everyone) no longer views a computer as a "computer" but rather as a person, a sentient being

[Zoli Erdos]

What's amazing is how this being a school assignment initially confined her to a very limited world of reality today, and was thinking of improvements upon that bases. Outside this context, ("assignment") would she not normally think more freely, and with all the input from Sci-Fi films probably draw up the intelligent, talking, thinking "computer" of the future that hardly resembles a computer as we know it today?

[Manne]

My favorite rendition of future computing is the equipment and resulting immersive experience computer users have in Snow Crash, the book by Neal Stephensson.

On the topic of talking computers that don't really look like computers WIRED had a really interesting article about a company called LeapFrog (well known for previous succesful educational high tech "toys") two weeks ago. Based on a Swedish product called Anoto (which got a fair amount of press about a year or so ago I think) they have created a computer where the input interface is pen and paper and the output a speaker.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/leapfrog.html

[Gordon]

If you really want to bend your mind thinking about the future, check out Ray Kurzweil's new book: The Singularity is Near.

Kurzweil predicts that if the rate of growth in transistors on chips continues on its exponential trajectory, by 2100 a $1000 desktop machine would have more a million X the processing power of the combined total of every neuron in every person's head on the planet firing concurrently.

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Timeline of future technology and social change
http://www.jrmooneyham.com/s2049.html
http://www.jrmooneyham.com/s2049ref.html