[video=youtube;SjhB6J23Qjs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjhB6J23Qjs[/video] Ray Kurzweil - Transcendent Man
Technology is developing so fast that it's getting more and more difficult to predict what's coming. I read most science fiction work and see it as an alternate universe genre rather than possible futures, because who can really say how vastly different the world is going to look in just 30 or 40 years, let alone 200 or 1,000. Will we live in other galaxies in 2050? I'm going with no. Probably still no flying cars. But if I were to jump into that world, I bet it would be so strange to the present-me that I would be completely lost in how they do things and how their culture will be because I think things will change that much faster.
Yeah, the rate of growth in technology has been speeding up over time. So more will be developed over the next 20 years then was developed over the past 20 years. And that rate of increase has been exponential. So...I feel that it's basically impossible to imagine what things will look like in a century. I think even the next 20 years is dicey. We have a "feeling" for what 20 years of change brings, but that feeling is probably far too conservative.
You know that feeling you get when your top of the line, shiny new phone/TV/computer/etc. is suddenly inferior to all the new stuff on the market after 6 months? Seems like it'll be just weeks/days in the future. That said I think there is a trend away from just continually cramming more proverbial horsepower in these devices. Apple comes to mind with virtually all of their products not top of the line as far as raw specs go but the software and infrastructure of the device is very, very good. Nintendo with the DS and Wii decided that adding raw power to video game consoles may not necessarily be the answer in the long run but different dynamics of gameplay using new technologies could be more important than just injecting the same games with better graphics, more processing power, more buttons, etc. At a certain point it seems like we'll reach the limit of how much processing power a device needs, it'll be fascinating to see what happens from there.
That is only if you think in terms of conventional appliances. Suppose in the future, you don't have devices, you have something like virtual reality executed by nanobots that can assemble themselves into pretty much anything. Or creating more powerful, digital brains that our personalities and memories can be stored in, essentially making our essential personalities immortal even if physical bodies aren't. I mean, a lot of this has been postulated by science fiction, but more and more futurists with strong scientific backgrounds are saying that these things are imaginable as extensions of what we already know. It will just take unbelievable amounts of computing power. So, personally, while I have no idea exactly what channel technology will go down in the future, I'm quite sure that more and more processing power will always be usable. Someone looking at a radio a century ago might have wondered what value there would be in making radios more and more powerful...but that's because he had no idea about television and personal computers and iPods that could hold thousands of songs. I do agree that it this point in time, design and ease of use are the more valuable things to mainstream consumers than raw power. But I'm sure we'll find ways to use more processing power.
