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The Science Of The Next 150 Years: 150 Years in the Future
Predicting what next year's (or next week's) ipad is going to be like is hard enough. Knowing what computers in general will be like 150 years from now—an eternity in technology development—is nearly impossible. On the other hand, technology prophets, computer pioneers and researchers have never been known for their reticence on the subject of the future. So we thought it wouldn't hurt to ask them. For starters, will there even be computers in the far future?
This article was originally published with the title A Bold and Foolish Effort to Predict the Future of Computing.
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13 Comments
Add CommentThe big surprise has been the iPad and such. Women like its light weight. Businesses like its relative freedom from viruses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComputers will become lighter and built into every woman's purse. One type of purse will have a snap down side revealing an LCD display and keyboard. Another type will fold out like a map or tissue. It will also serve as a phone. It will be lightweight. She will be able to turn the screen into a mirror to put on her lipstick. The outside of the purse will also have LCD diodes so she can change its color to match her shoes.
Men will carry a few sheets of special paper. One will serve as the computer screen. Another will serve as the typewriter. His screen and keys will be larger than hers. He will spread his out. Copies will be kept on the main frame back in the office since only a gazillion bits can be stored locally.
Web searches will still be required. Only the Library of Congress will be totally digitized. The British, French, and Vatican projects will be about half completed. And the Chinese will not yet have started transferring their libraries to digital form.
Someone will program computers to teach literature. Then at some obscure charter schools students will again learn literature by dead white men. Those schools filled with the riff-raff of society will suddenly bypass the expensive boarding schools and become the best in the world. We could read letters like those written by Civil War Solders with a 7th grade education, or plays written by Mercy Otis Warren. Meat might just slip into our pablum curriculum.
Businesses like the iPad's portability, look, and ease of use. Its malware issues (and security issues in general) are becoming more well-known and businesses are locking them down ever tighter because of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn 150 years, there will still be security experts because there will still be people subverting the systems. Quantum computers will have changed cryptography to something barely recognizable, and old secrets of people dead for centuries will have been unveiled, making more clear the roles played, both good and bad.
In 150 years computers will determine their own evolution.......people will not need to "learn" anything, everyone will have a chip inserted into the brain shortly after conception (assuming they are pre-approved for life). That chip will connect everyones brain to a master computer which will dispense any knowledge, skill or information necessary for any task or recreation at hand. I saw the movie.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this150 years? If Moore's Law actually holds up that long, and considering that computers will be designing the next generation of computer there's no reason it won't end up being an underestimate, we'll have computers that are
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 times smarter than they are now. We won't be.
Flip-open purses with flexible screens are a couple of years off... maybe. 150 years from now? Screens? Keyboards? We already have systems that start predicting the word you're typing before you finish, and the word after that too. 150 years from now, by the time you're at the 4 letter, the computer will write your entire essay on 16th century British authors, or whatever... it will know everything you read, what you discussed, how you think, EVERYTHING. You will not have to think, not at all. We will be a society of artists, not thinkers, and we'll be self-selecting for appearance rather than intelligence. Yes, we will be stupid. We'll probably be so stupid that we'll all still go to university, amassing huge debt, and then spend the rest of our lives working in hair salons or serving fries to pay it off. The computers should get a chuckle out of that.
David...
What is the point of such fanciful looks at the long term? It's looking increasingly unlikely that humans will even be around that long, considering what they are doing to the only planet we know can support us. It's just pointless navel gazing though one thing is guaranteed: the future will look nothing like what anyone projects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComputer chips dissipate heat, and also require energy to operate. So I imagine combining the two into "solar processors", which have a photovoltaic layer that directly feeds the circuitry just underneath. They are thin enough to be air-cooled. They will need a connection to the network, which can be a combination of rf antennas and wires.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis device can be considered a solar "leaf", a multitude of which would make up a "computer tree". Rather than being made in a factory, micromachinery would extract the silicon from the soil and build the tree on the spot.
Electronic handbags are so pedestrian. They are little more than custom cases for a tablet. If you are projecting far into the future, try to think a bit more out of the box.
What you are talking about is the "optical depth" of the future. We can make an analogy with optics, where one unit of optical depth is that which reduces light by a factor of e. In the time dimension, where our knowledge of the future is reduced by a factor of e, our ability to predict the future is reduced by the same ratio, so we can define a "depth" or visibility horizon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the case of Moore's Law for semiconductors, progress is predictable for a few years forward, because Intel and others have processes in the lab that will likely make it into production. Beyond some point, however, we don't know if they can shrink the circuits any more, and what, if any substitute methods can continue making progress. So our uncertainty of computer chip power grows, and the future gets hazy. When the uncertainty reaches a factor of e, we can say we have reached a unit of visibility depth.
Apply the same idea to other fields, and each will have it's own limits on visibility, and we can get some measure of global uncertainty of the future. My guess is the total limit is something like 30-50 years. Therefore trying to predict 150 years in the future is an exercise in futility.
In the future our computers will be in the contacts that we put in our eyes every morning.This will be our connection to the world,our phone,tv,and everything else will be controlled by this one div ice.It will be able to immerse us in in an holographic world where we can go and do anything we want.The entire circuitry will be printed on it and it will be powered by the light that falls on them.They will be able to read your mind by seeing the minute fluctuations of our irises and images will be projected directly upon our retinas,sound will be given to us by body powered sonic devices implanted just be hind our ears.For the most part transportation will be a thing of the past,with most people working at home.Those that in manufacturing producing large things will be controlling fully automatic systems with their minds,as for most smaller items each home will have a 3D replicator making everything else including their food.It won't matter if we are living above or below ground.Our vast numbers by then will be underground thus allowing all our other ecosystems to survive and preventing mass extinction.By then we should be building generation star ships and sending them of to other stars.It won't matter if it takes even thousands years to get there,they won't be coming back.So traveling at 10% of the speed of light will allow our species to spread outward across the galaxy.By then our lifespans should have more than doubled with boredom being the biggest threat to our civilization.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the contacts you describe are near term... even 50 years from now it will instead be some sort of permanent implant, and 150 years from now, humans will be engineered with computer interfaces built in, so need for separate implants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA person from today, even a tech savvy one, plopped down in the world of 150 years from now, probably would be totally lost and unable to understand anything going on... they wouldn't recognize much about the modified humans facing them... and frankly wouldn't have the tools built into their brains to help them understand, never mind the right social frame of reference (although no doubt there will still be plenty of poor in the slums living not too differently than the poor of today, humanity being what it is).
Sorry for not sugar coating this post, but we all know that the Patriot Act will be still in existence under a One World Government, run by psychopaths who are, greedy, totally paranoid control freaks. We will be serfs, and they will be able to follow our every mood and thought patterns, through GoogleThink, which will also have XRay satellites that can see into our living rooms.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe mega rich will finally be able to attain their "rightful place", and will be living like Pharaohs, but that won't be enough for them, they will all want to be top of the heap and will kill each other until a new Oliver Cromwell comes along and we start all over again, and so it will go until the year 2962, when we will become so lazy from having robots do everything for us from cradle to grave that we will all be fat and lounging around next to artificial swimming pools in Florida, just pressing buttons to order more McDonalds Burgers, which will still be exactly the same, only by then they will actually have some nutritional value as well as the fat and sugar. We will read old books about how people used to work, make jokes, have sex to create children, how they used to question why we should be at war with supposed terrorists and actually concerned themselves with crazy ideas like community, family, compassion, empathy and honesty. Oh, wait, sorry that's all next year.
(A joke, or may be half a joke and half seriously))
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn some respects I would like to move a hundred and fifty years back.
I think CRT monitors and TV's used to have better image than flat monitors and TV's of today.
Windows XP is better to work with than Windows 7. But Windows 7 is more beautiful.
I do not know if a very formal study with measure instruments may signal that flat screens are better than the old lovely CRT monitors and TV's.
Also one advantage of flat screens is that they are light weight.
That is the way things appear to me without entering into great detail. That (what I say) may be unfair and bias.
Obviously with respect to microprocessors is much to be done. Probably we can discard electrons and use photons.
Probably Old Good Moore's Law will probably hold true for years to come. This is unbelievable but true. It looks like an intuitive creation.
But intuition is behind a lot of important think and will continue to be so, may be for ever.
The Earth is about one half way through this approximately one hundred and fifty million year cycle. Evolution has provided the likes of us in just a few thousand years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe as humans ponder our existence and are, from time to time, swayed by evidence and discoveries. Mans’ interpretation of these is, in most part, foggy and he will scratch, bite and kill to protect his egotistic interpretations.
Only a couple of hundred years have passed since a person would have been burnt at the stake had he talked about Dinosaurs or, in more recent times, ostracized for thinking man could fly to the moon.
In recent times of discovery man is tripping all over himself trying to contain this new knowledge within his box. A time has come when communication (computer) has blown the lid off. I feel for the well-meaning, good people that have been duped by so-called education.
(To Bruce)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat a beautiful way of writing! Even when a little bit of what you say is not entirely clear to me!
[I agree with 99% of what you say (in such a beautiful way)the other 1% is simply not entirely clear to me].
[If I may say, if you have not written a book already, You ought to write one soon].
Happy and productive 2013!