The Next 25 Years in Tech 166
PCWMike writes "PCs may disappear from your desk by 2033. But with digital technology showing up everywhere else — including inside your body — computing will only get more personal, reports Dan Tynan for PC World's 25th Anniversary. While convenience will be increased by leaps and bounds, it will come at a profound loss in our sense of what privacy means. 'Technology will become firmly embedded in advanced devices that deliver information and entertainment to our homes and our hip pockets, in sensors that monitor our environment from within the walls and floors of our homes, and in chips that deliver medicine and augment reality inside our bodies. This shiny happy future world will come at a cost, though: Think security and privacy concerns. So let's hope that our jetpacks come with seat belts, because it's going to be a wild ride.'"
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
First they took away our lan,
then the internet infrastructure stateside needs $100 million,
now they want to take away my computer.. shit. give it up already.
These guys can barely forecast seasons and they're going to tell us what's going to happen in 25 years? As the tag says, "Where's my flying car?"
Re:Bio-CPU? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/37/ (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing to add.
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:4, Insightful)
Being young doesn't mean you lack knowledge of recent history.
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine what it was like to live through the era when Iron [wikipedia.org] was being developed that could slice right through the Bronze [wikipedia.org] that protected inferior armies... to the point where you could rape and pillage an entire village in under a week. You could march from Cairo to Rome in a matter of years and being conquering and conquering all along the way!
No, seriously. Technology in the future is going to be *way* cooler than it is now. You never reflect on what life was like for your grandparents before the automobile or refrigerators were standards for every family. Your grandchildren won't reflect on what life was like for you without the internet or the cell phone...
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm 49 years old and MY generation has lived through the same. big deal. ALL generations live through history. It's what makes it history.
-Multiple, world-influencing major conflicts.
Like WW2? You lived through that one? I didn't either. Or Napoleon's conquest of Europe? I missed that one too. Oh, and the Aryan invasion of India. That was a biggie I missed out on too. Also: the Viking invasions of the 11th century. Nasty stuff. missed out on that butchery too.
-The introduction, widespread distribution, and near-anywhere access of the Internet (which, in my opinion, is one of our greatest achievements as humans.)
Yeah. That's a big one. kind of like THE TELEPHONE which laid the infrastructure that permitted the internet in the first place.
-The rise of wireless mobile devices that have the potential to function anywhere in the world.
That HAS THE POTENTIAL. whatever. Skip this one.
-Computers moving from universities and government orgs, taking up entire rooms, to becoming nearly universal in our homes, cars, and pockets.
Yeah. almost as big as the invention of AGRICULTURE.
-The rise of communication to the point where an actor can die in New York, and within ONE HOUR the entire world knowing of it (those parts of the world that has access to the net, radio, and/or TV of course)
Right. Like the death of an actor in NY is really such important news that it should be spread by this massive energy and resource intense global network, while IMPORTANT information is trivialised or buried by the same gossipy horseshit called "news", to the point where Real News is covered by COMEDIANS because the news organs have turned into little more than propaganda organs for the military industrial death machine.
-9/11 (one of the most world-changing events in modern history)
compared to WHAT? The USA incinerating hundreds of thousands of japanese CIVILIANS (you know - women and kids and pets and old folks and stuff) with ATOMIC WEAPONS? how is THAT not terrorism on a scale far beyond 9/11? Or the fire bombing of Tokyo? MacNamara himself said ON FILM that what he and LeMay did were WAR CRIMES. And speaking of that, what about events like Kristalnacht? Or Stalin's Purges and Pogroms? Yeah... We focus on 9/11 because we lived through it. But there's been much worse and things of far greater import and disaster than 9/11.
And many more. Seriously folks. We are living through one of the most exciting and important parts of history in the entire time-line of our species.
It's always exciting. I'm just concerned that we may be living at the end of the story, rather than the action packed middle chapters...
Centuries from now, people will be wondering "Imagine what it was like to live through the era where in roughly one century we went from taking weeks to get a message across a country and taking literally MONTHS to travel across the sea... to the point where you could talk to someone on the other side of the world using a device no bigger than your fist, and could travel from New York to Australia in a matter of hours."
And then they say "And because they were so stupid, greedy, selfish and destructive they pissed it all away on CRAP like Las Vegas and celebrity gossip magazines and mind numbing TV shows about nothing, we no longer have the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the world, because we spend most of our time as a society recovering from the die-off they drove themselves into, and now our planet's a furnace, the metals are gone or buried in landfills that are now underwater, the oil was used up in the 21st century, the coal vanished in the 22nd, and that's when the dying began in earnest. The information systems collapsed when the electrical grid became unstable and then disappeared. The last airplane flew in 2115, and it was more of a kite
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We are living through history, folks (Score:1, Insightful)