I was talking to my 22 year step son (geek) and he casually told me that in 10 years the internet will be radically different. OK. That led me to this: http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/scenarios/ Another person puts it this way: I think it will be like air. It will be so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. Everything will be connected all the time. People will have forgotten what it was like for anything NOT to be connected. Your clothes dryer will be on the Net. It will text you when the clothes are done and email the warranty shop for repairs when it breaks. Your car will do the same even when traveling down the road. Your mailbox will let you know when a catalog arrives and the sender too. It is predicted that in ten years there will be a trillion nodes on the Net and less than 0.01% of them will be people sitting in front of a screen.
I'm excited to see how far and fast the technological age takes us. Just to watch the progression of cell phones and what they have done with that product over the last 10 years is amazing to me. The micro chip has revolutionized the world.
I'm guessing Google will permeate everything with Adwords. If you drive down the street, you're phone will be assaulted with deals from every store you pass (based on GPS) with special offers. Your phone might be a necklace that projects its screen against any surface in front of you, and automatically scans objects you encounter in the off-chance you might want to know something about it. You'll never lose anything ever because a full-time video recorder built into the "phone necklace" watches and remembers where you place objects. It also has great facial recognition software, and will automatically whisper a reminder of every person's name you encounter, perhaps in a different tone if you've met them before. It might even suggest that you have three friends who know 2 people who are great friends of theirs on Facebook. Just think about the difference in the internet between 2001 and now. Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter....it's crazy to think that in the next decade we might see even more rapid innovations.
My email already tells me when I get a delivery, but my clothes dryer and car will not be texting me nor would anyone want that service.
I think it's inevitable that everything will be "smart." Not just appliances, but the very fabrics we build with. Literal fabrics for clothes, the pavement for streets and sidewalks, concrete for buildings, etc. As we move further and further toward the nano age, processors and the pixels for displays can be woven into everything and everything can be connected to the Internet. Anything can be a screen, anything can search for information, anything can network with anything else. Streets can register the parking spots in the city and transmit to drivers who are interested what spots are available nearby you. Touching a garment in your closet can toss up a display on the wall of what you'd look like with it on. Looking at the menu posted outside a restaurant, you could immediately see beside it the reviews from an online database. Information will simply be a part of everything we use...it will be woven into living. That definitely seems not only inevitable to me, but not that far off. This is not to say it will be utopian...that level of information being transferred around will certainly bring a host of new concerns.
someday the robot overlords will be able to send and recieve cloud based mind clusters via organic laser pulse
That's the upcoming trend in biotech as well. Just this academic year, I've been working on a couple projects that have the ultimate goal of reducing user input, and minimizing side/unwanted effects as a result of error.
Yeah, there are a lot of promising avenues for technology to advance along...nanotech, biotech, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. I think the blend of those four fields is going to lead to a world, in the next half-century or so, unrecognizable to people who lived just 50 years earlier (had they not been around to see the changes happen along the way).
It is plainly obvious that we don't have the ability to control things like that. We will kill ourselves first. We don't have to do things just because we can.
Got a droid phone a week ago. I truly feel more connected with all the apps. It was pretty overwhelming when I first got it, too. I'd start fiddling and I couldn't step away from it for 20 minutes.
Odd you say that as my boss (Mr Anti Techy) was forced to recently use one of those phones by his boss and now he can't put the damn thing down.
