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Worst and Best Predictions on Technology
prostoalex writes "Dow Jones News asked several mahor scientists and technologists about their worst and best predictions of the future. The story, republished at Yahoo! Finance Singapore quotes Lester Thurow, Professor of management and economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management; Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; Glover Ferguson, Chief scientist, Accenture; Alan Nugent, Chief technology officer, Novell; Peter Cochrane, Director, ConceptLabs; Michael Earl, Dean, Templeton College, University of Oxford. There seems to be a common agreement on having overrated the ability of machines to talk back to users and vice versa."
You mean Arthur C Clarke's First Law - "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Do at least try to attribute the correct author!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Clarke's 1st Law
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke's 2nd Law
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Clarke's 3rd Law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Voice will never be more effective then a good keyboard. A good typist using a bad (QWERTY) keyboard gets 60+ WPM, try talking that fast and keeping your thoughts together, or even accuratly reading that fast. Even A modest typer can type better then speak. Imagine an office with everyon talking to their computers.
Even in star treck there was very little actual voice command, they had keyboard things all over the place. I would say most voice interaction was information lookups to the point that google will be able to do in 15 years. But for real commands and interface it will be non voice.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Maybe you've watched too much Back to the Future? (1955 - 1985 - 2015).
Zemeckis and Gale said they chose 1955 in the first one because its the typical generation gap - a typical age at which married couples have children. They wanted to choose a time where Marty's parents would be teenagers. They were mid-40's in 1985 (47 to be exact), so 1955 was a nice round number, and would put them at 17 in the past.
Similar reason when they went to 2015 - they wanted Marty and Marty Jr to be the same age (as Michael J Fox played both of them).
- Chuq