And 20 Years Out? - Another Perspective.

I'm pretty clear that I don't really know what things will be like twenty years from now -- all I have to do is think back to twenty years ago (a year before the first IBM PC) to realize that even my optimistic view of technology never envisioned my current 1 GHz PC with its third-of-a-gigabyte of memory and 40 gigabytes of disk space and broadband connection to a global communications network. So, especially considering that the rate of technology advancement is growing each year, how could I possibly guess at twenty years from now?

But that doesn't stop some people from trying their best to extrapolate where today's science, and tomorrow's ideas, will take us, and RCFoC reader Tony Waltham brings our attention to a series of future-looking articles from British Telecom that I found interesting, if occasionally disquieting (http://www.btdomain.com/communications/articles_rethfuture.htm#01). I'm not sure that I want to see all of these articles' prognostications come true, but they certainly are valuable food for thought.

For example (with a bit of my interpretation thrown in), the first article by BT's Ian Pearson peers through his crystal ball to see computer intelligence catching up with human intelligence by 2020 -- essentially, synthetic intelligence will be able to pass the Turing Test (you won't be able to detect if you're conversing with a human or an Artificial Intelligence -- see Ray Kurzweil's recent books for more on this subject.) Such AIs will be so good that they will far surpass the 1980s Eliza "toy" psychoanalyst software, and will actually pose as effective robotic psychiatrists.

Virtual environments, such as in today's game EverQuest (http://www.everquest.com/), will become fully immersive 3D environments for both play and work, bringing (dare I say it) a new dimension to telecommuting and virtual meetings. And they will also bring new business opportunities. For example, if we're going to be represented by our avatars in virtual environments, won't we want them to look their best? The purchase or rental of virtual fashions may spark a very real industry (in fact it's already done so in early virtual communities, such as in EverQuest's Norrath, where people work long and hard to get just the right colored robe, or that perfect flashy armor, that they want to be seen wearing.)

Sensors, such as the growing number of municipal cameras that watch vehicular and pedestrian traffic, will be augmented by a vast number of tiny "smart dust" sensors that will diligently fill up the greatly enhanced storage devices of 2020. Everything will be connected, anywhere. Indeed, Ian sees 75% of the global population being able to reach out and touch the Internet. (Of course, he recognizes that not everyone will be pleased with this level of technological intrusion; he also envisions Luddite communities growing in protest.)

By 2020, he sees the global Internet spelling the doom of national currencies. Much as the Euro is becoming the common coin of the European realm, Ian sees a global electronic currency similarly becoming the coin of the virtual realm. And then, because of the Internet's reach into the real world, he sees it becoming the global currency of choice. (Think that's improbable? E-gold (http://www.e-gold.com/) is working right now to establish just such specie!)

Timeline.

And there's more to whet our technological whistle. BT offers us a year-by-year timeline of innovations over the next 20 years. They include (in small part), some things that have already happened, such as Casio's wristwatch camera and speech dialing. But they go on to suggest things like "single sheet PCs with processing built into the display" by 2002, synthetic organic life by 2003, 300 gigabit CD-ROMs by 2004, and on-line voting in the UK by 2007 (which might have saved us quite a bit of angst on this side of the pond, this year.)

BT's timeline continues, seeing billion-transistor chips by 2009. And by 2010, they foresee that the highest paid entertainment star will be synthetic (think of today's popular synthetic Japanese star, Kyoko Date, with ten more years of technology under her virtual belt - http://www.kyokodate.com/ .)

DNA computers are foreseen by 2012, and by 2013 they suggest that "computer agents [will] start being thought of as colleagues, instead of tools." 2015 will see 3D videoconferencing, 2016 will bring to reality the Jetsons' "Rosie the household robot, " and in 2017, machine knowledge will exceed human knowledge. (I told you I hoped that all of these don't come to pass.)

2018, they suggest, will bring the 1-petabit memory chip. And 2020 will see "smart skin" that can help repair the fragile humans that still inhabit the planet. Incongruously, considering that I'm writing this at 37,000 feet while traveling at 560 miles per hour, they expect that the planes of 2020, although larger and with 6,000 miles of range, will still be subsonic (no one-hour sub-orbital flights to the other side of the globe.)

Ebusiness.

This series of BT articles continues by exploring the Ebusiness of 2020, when 80% of homes have Internet access, most appliances are Internet citizens, and "plug and play finally works." (Hey, it does have its problems, but even today plug and play is MUCH better than the pre-plug and play alternative!)

They expect that my COMDEX run-in with Aibo (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20001127.html#_Toc499300003) will have led to robotic pets becoming common, where "cute, cuddly robotic pets provide extra amusement by ambushing the cat." (I hope we can turn that behavior off.)

Customized clothes, cut to fit our body-scanned images, will be common. And all of this Ebusiness will be lubricated by "seamless electronic commerce" using the global electronic currency we touched on earlier. Of course, as they describe (and I won't give away why), this may lead to "playground black markets," and to various forms of "barter economies" that have significant tax-collection implications. The role of banks will be considerably different than today, when they will have to be far more agile.

The Future?

There are quite a few more forecasts in this interesting, and perhaps a bit technologically controversial, series of articles. And you, like I, may not agree with all of them; indeed, we may hope that some results that ARE technologically possible, do not occur. But the ideas are still worth reading, and considering.

We know that many changes are going to occur over the next twenty years, driven by changes in societies, in economies, and by the rapidly changing face of computing. Consider that in 1971, a 4004 microprocessor contained 2,300 transistors. Today's Pentium 4 contains 42 million, and as we've learned earlier in this issue, we may be seeing 400 million transistor chips within 4 years. Imagine what the chips twenty years from now will be capable of!

Which is why I believe that the more we consider how even far-out ideas may intertwine and morph and play out, the better we'll be able to guide our future into one that we can, quite literally, live with.

Don't blink!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."