In a couple of weeks, many of the tools and technologies destined to enhance the lives and livelihoods of future generations will move from development laboratories to the San Jose Convention Center. Indeed, as you read this, ACM is putting the finishing touches on one of its most ambitious events—a specialized futuristic conference to educate […]
March 2001 - Vol. 44 No. 3
Features
An ongoing effort involving dozens of people and pilot programs with hundreds of employees at Sun Microsystems could be the next model for large high-tech companies worldwide in molding the workplace to information-age realities, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Whereas the setup of traditional high-tech companies was established in the industrial era, when people […]
With its valuable characteristics, software is the most effective knowledge storage medium, making it the future currency of the world.
Digital Village: A Cyberpublishing Manifesto
The distribution of digital information on physical media is just not effective. Information belongs in cyberspace.
Digital immortality, like ordinary immortality, is a continuum from enduring fame at one end to endless experience and learning at the other, stopping just short of endless life. Preserving and transmitting your ideas is one-way immortality—allowing communication with the future. Endless experience and learning is two-way immortality—allowing you, or at least part of you, to […]
Closing the Circle of Information Technology
Information technology has already penetrated and transformed research in science and technology so fundamentally that younger generations will not know what it was like before the computing revolution. My own career as a microbiologist exploring the linkages between environment and health has paralleled this transformation. My own research experience has given me a deep respect […]
As part of an article on travelers’ expectations, USA Today, September 23, 2000, reported: “The angry woman with children in tow had some choice words for the theme park marketing director. Where were the live dinosaurs she and her kids saw in the park’s TV commercials? She had paid good money, only to view fake […]
How might we interact with future computers? Let me list the ways: by gesture; by hand, foot, and body motion; by the speed and forcefulness of our activities; by our thoughts, feelings, and emotions; by where, how, and when we look; by speech and sound; by music and touch. Imagine it, and it shall come […]
We experience our physical environment through our natural senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Combined with the models of the world each of us develops through learning, they allow us to experience and function in the physical and social worlds. The history of civilization follows the development of our understanding of “experience” and […]
Future chips, displays, and micromachines will be fabricated by printing. A version of the future fab will sit on your desktop, will be programmable by the user, and fabricate the things such as chips and micromachines we normally associate with billion-dollar fabs. This vision of the future has its basis in new chemistries, printing technologies, […]
Look to the Past to Envision the Future
A key distinguishing characteristic of human beings is our use of tools, including extensive use of communications technologies. From plows to mills to books and radios, we have used technology to create tools and means of communicating. Drawing upon those engineering feats, we have built extensive social and societal structures that made possible ever-increasingly healthy […]
The future is about creating an environment where the complications and the distractions of technology are not upsetting, diverting, or overwhelming. Technology is already guiding us to information that is valuable to us, but people care more about relationships and communicating with people—these are the foci in the future. Our work in the Context Aware […]
Predicting the future is an activity fraught with error. Wilbur Wright, co-inventor of the motorized airplane that successfully completed the first manned flight in 1903, seems to have learned this lesson when he noted: "In 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years. Ever since I have … […]
Processing devices, even relatively low-end ones, are sent forth into the world in much the same way as we send astronauts into space. They are carefully packaged to protect them from the environment, accompanied by a great deal of baggage, given long-range communications abilities, and—in order to allow them to run at the performance limits […]
-User Interfaces: Disappearing, Dissolving, and Evolving
User-computer interfaces are a necessary evil.
After communication, search is the most visible and important aspect of the Internet. The first major sites were search engines; although they have evolved into portals, search remains fundamental to the vision, purpose, and performance of the network. The Internet’s technical (and social) elegance is its anarchy and freedom of information sharing; everyone can add […]
Bandwidth and the Creation of Awareness
Modern telecommunications is the transmission of electromagnetic signals using technology that ultimately delivers useful information to people or machines in the form of voice, data, and video. But the essence of telecommunications is content, not technology or signals. Until now, the properties of this content have been limited by available bandwidth. But wired (or fiber) […]
Friedrich Nietzche ushered in the existential era at the end of the 19th century with his proclamation that “God is dead.” A century later, Nicholas Negropointe ushered in the electronic era with his proclamation that “place is dead.” Negropointe wrote that we would prefer being digital and our primary address would be identified by “@” […]
Unquestionably, mobile and wireless computing will dominate the Internet industry in the future. New and exciting e-services are already being deployed while at the same time the Internet becomes more and more pervasive in our everyday lives. New economy entrepreneurs have leveraged huge sums of money to develop sophisticated applications that will forever change the […]
The Digital Physics of Data Mining
If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work. —Jacques Cousteau, oceanographer
When Computers Speak, Hear, and Understand
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." The HAL9000 computer responsible for the Discovery spacecraft’s mission to Jupiter in the classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke was more than reluctant to oblige despite the immediate risk to astronaut Dave Bowman. Still, almost two generations of science fiction and […]
When the Network Is Everything
Two major properties will characterize networks in the future. They will be ubiquitous; by default, everything will be connected to a network of some form and work in coordination with other devices, services, and network-enabled entities. And they will be invisible, always there and always in use; we will notice them only in those rare […]
What is a wearable? Fair question to ask. With new technology, a few pioneers, some media coverage, and a couple of start-ups, it is an emerging industry ahead of a market trying to define itself. Are present-day wearables designed from what we see around us? Is an industrial-grade PC lugged around with a belt strap […]
Pushing Functionality Into Even Smaller Devices
In today’s society, people need computers, computers that are not only functional in terms of computation, but functional in our mobile, dynamic, and social lives. As computing becomes more pervasive, people will carry their access devices with them—everywhere, all the time. So, in the design of these access devices, we must understand users’ needs beyond […]
Computational Bioimaging For Medical Diagnosis and Treatment
"The future of radiology is not getting the data. We have plenty of data. The need is how to make use of all the data we have." —Dr. William Orrison, chairman, Department of Radiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Can we replace costly and possibly unethical animal experiments by computer runs? Can we have computer versions of ourselves that can be used for medical experiments, reducing the danger of risky trials? I believe will have some positive answers to these questions in the centuries ahead. It is safe to infer the major role that […]
Continuum Computer Architecture For Exaflops Computation
The ultimate computers in our long-term future will deliver exaflops-scale performance (or greater) and will look very different from today’s microprocessors and massively parallel computers. Ironically, however, their alien structures and operational behavior can be inferred from the same technology trends driving development of today’s conventional computing systems. A vision of future computer architectures that […]
What will nanotechnology and macronetworks do for the informed human race? Computers are vanishing. They are vanishing into the infrastructure around us, whether it is the insides of appliances (telephones, televisions) or simply shrunk to take less valuable desktop, pocket, or other real estate. At the same time, networks are becoming pervasive. In the last […]
Spiritual Life and Information Technology
We write this essay in a tentative and exploratory voice. We are in the early process of opening a new topic for discussion in our field, and the discussions are filled with surprises for us. About 50 people attended special interest group session we conducted at last year’s CHI conference entitled "Can We Have Spiritual […]
Predict the state of cryptography in 1,000 years. The thought is daunting. The very narrowness of the field makes the problem that much more difficult. It is one thing to try to decide whether sentient life on Earth will be made of carbon or silicon, quite another to speculate on whether it will need to […]
Promise and Peril?the Deeply Intertwined Poles of 21st Century Technology
There have been increasingly urgent warnings from Bill Joy (cofounder of Sun and principal developer of the Java programming language) and others on the impending dangers from emerging self-replicating technologies. The day is close at hand when it will be feasible to create designer genetically altered pathogens in college laboratories. After that, we’ll have to […]
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs. That is, mostly people who can […]
One way to forecast 1,000 years ahead is to look back 1,000 years. How is today’s economy different from its counterpart 1,000 years ago, and what does that difference suggest about what the economy will be like 1,000 years from now? Human beings are a product of evolution, suggesting that competition, in various guises, will […]
Be Absolute For Death: Life After Moore's Law
If there was ever a creator of wealth on a fantastic scale, ever a changer of custom and social values, ever a determinant of where our culture is headed and why, it’s Moore’s Law. Gordon Moore didn’t so much invent his law as observe it—the apparently inexorable increase in the number of transistors that could […]
Accountability Through Transparency;: Life in 2050
The year is 2050 and we, the People of the United States, live in a truly "cammed nation." The eyes of digital video surveillance devices are tucked into every nook and cranny of our lives, like sand in a two-year-old’s swimsuit after a day at the beach. Scandal these days is bred not when such […]
Toward a New Politics of Intellectual Property
Until recently, copyright was on the periphery of law because it involved technical rules for a highly specialized industry. The politics of copyright largely focused on intra-industry bickering. The typical response of a legislature to these intra-industry struggles has been to propose that affected parties meet behind closed doors and hammer out compromise language that […]
Forget the Past to Win the Future
If computer scientists were asked to speculate on their future 10, 20, or 30 years ago they would have been consistently shortsighted. The science fiction writers were infinitely better in predicting developments. We should acknowledge that it is always the case. We will always be pessimistic of what we can achieve. Part of the reason […]
Once upon a time, nations laid claim to three-mile, off-shore extensions of their jurisdictions. Any nation desiring to send its ships within three miles of another nation’s coast either obtained permission first, or risked having its ships fired-upon, cannon-damaged, and sunk. There was nothing magical about the measure of three miles: it simply represented the […]
As we continue into the terra nova of the electronic frontier, there is no set destiny that determines how the electronic society evolves. For all of the promise of true democracy, free markets, unrestrained speech, and the creation of a global village, there remains the distinct possibility that the tools empowering this utopia will just […]
A Larger Role in the Public Policy Process For User Control
Predictions of the future always remind me of a documentary film I saw in a third-grade science class. The substitute teacher introduced it as The Year 2000 or something of the sort. It was filled with expert predictions of the technologies we could expect to enjoy at the turn of the next millennium. The idea […]
Fundamentally, technology is an extension of the stick. When the arm could not reach, the ingenious human found a long object to help. Any discussion of the future of computing has to consider its use in human practice. When I look at technology I evaluate its maturity, its readiness to transform practice. As such, I […]
Can Freedom Withstand E-Books?
Communications published a science fiction story of mine in 1997 called "The Right to Read," in which I describe a world 50 years hence where it is illegal to lend your books to a friend. This story is becoming reality even faster than anticipated. You may have noticed the great deal of hype about e-books […]
Shall we believe the predictions of the end of humanity at the hands of robots and our survival from global warming? Our science-fiction writers have done a much better job than our futurists. Here’s what I learned from them about what might be in 1,010 years: We will create superior robots that eventually decide they […]
Insurance and the Computer Industry
In the future, the computer security industry will be run by the insurance industry. I don’t mean insurance companies will start selling firewalls, but rather the kind of firewall you use—along with the kind of authentication scheme you use, the kind of operating system you use, and the kind of network monitoring scheme you use—will […]
The Future of the Internet Digital Divide
Technologically, Internet capacity will continue to increase into the foreseeable future. The available bandwidth, storage capacity, and processing capacity will grow from the current gigabits, gigabytes, and billions of instructions per second to tera-, peta-, exa-, zeta-measured amounts. The bandwidth available with deployment of dense wavelength wide division multiplexing (DWDM) and other emerging technologies promises […]
Software is arguably the word’s most important industry. The presence of software has made possible many new businesses and is responsible for increased efficiencies in most traditional businesses. Software, both directly and indirectly through the domains it automates, connects people as well as serves, entertains, educates, protects, heals, and nourishes. Although there are only about […]
Not if it’s business as usual in the software industry. But we could make it work. Throughout this issue, you’ll hear some amazing predictions about the future—instant universal communication, pervasive computing, new medical applications, and lots more. There’s only one problem. The software for all these things might not work. If today’s software is any […]
A Just-in-Time Software-Based World
In the past year, three new digital devices have provided a glimpse of daily changes in our future: the email PDA, the digital VCR, and the automobile GPS. The RIM Blackberry provides Microsoft Exchange email in realtime to my belt where I can read, reply, and forward messages 24-hours-a-day from anywhere in the world. It […]
Every opportunity to look forward is also an invitation to look back. We have little hope of understanding where we are going except within the context of where we have been. My own views on the future of computing and software grow from nearly four decades of work in the field. I would not want […]
The Ubiquitous Beauty of User-Aware Software
While the information age has brought computing technology to work, home, and community, users and computers are still fundamentally unrelated—and sometimes adversarial. The next era will revolutionize how computers and users interact. It is currently up to the user to assimilate many details of a new computer or software system, then adapt to its constraints. […]
Computer Security?an End State?
It seems that one cannot open a newspaper without reading about yet another computer security breach. Worse yet, even sites that should be well protected, such as the CIA’s Web site, have been hacked. Is this inevitable? Will matters continue to get worse? Or is there some fix in sight for the computer security problem? […]
A Commonsense Opportunity For Computing
As students, we begin by learning rules&facts, but in time, our job is to break them. To make clear my intention with this opening thought, let’s recall some classic rules&facts: The world was once believed flat; humans cannot fly; and machines cannot think nor have emotions. Perhaps we should break a few more rules&facts so […]
Keep (Over)reaching For the Stars
The year is 50,000 B.C. By a stream in the woods, very close to San Francisco Bay, stood Gulden Gote both nervous and excited about the experiment he was about to perform. The elders of the tribe stood close by in rapt attention. Gulden pushed three logs of wood across the stream, carefully wedging each between rocks at either end, with a rock in the middle for additional support. He took hardy twine and strapped the logs together in four places along the length. He then led a loaded mule across the stream. The first bridge known to mankind was built and tested that day. Everyone cheered. Flushed with enthusiasm Gulden rushed to the top of a nearby hill, pointed across the Bay, and announced to the elders that they should immediately commence work to build a mighty bridge over the next 50 years, and he proclaimed it shall be called the "Gulden Gote Bridge." The elders physically restrained him, calmed him down, and assigned him to teach others his bridge-building techniques. Some 50,000 years later, Gulden's descendants were among those who helped build the bridge across the bay. Perhaps, it was in his honor, they called it the Golden Gate Bridge.
Education Is the Key to Future Dreams
Because of my experience as an astronaut almost 40 years ago, I am often called on to recount that small piece of history and to reflect on the course of the U.S. space program since then. Not one of us involved in the early days could have predicted in 1962 the trajectories of progress that […]
Universal Literacy?a Challenge For Computing in the 21st Century
What would happen if you asked 50 successful female computer scientists about the future? As we approached the new century, the last years were full of visionary exercises—attempts to predict, state, or prognosticate a future for computing. Only rarely were women’s voices heard unless it was to comment on their rarity. What do women computer […]
The Computer Isn’t the Medium, It’s the Message
As long as there have been computers there have been people touting their value in education. But, the software produced for education has invariably been a dull approximation of the existing school system. Educational software meant drill and practice software for much of the early years in computing. Now it means taking dull educational materials […]
In the years ahead, the declining cost of computation will make digital technologies accessible to nearly everyone in all parts of the world, from inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S. to rural villages in developing nations. That will bring an end to the so-called "digital divide," right? Not necessarily. Even as people everywhere gain access to […]
Inside Risks: Computers: Boon or Bane?
Predicting the long-term effects of computers is both difficult and easy: we won’t get it right, but we won’t see ourselves proven wrong. Rather than try, we present some alternatives allowing readers to make their own predictions. Computers play an increasing role in enabling and mediating communication between people. They have great potential for improving […]
