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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."
People always overrate the future, its the one constant..
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...is those pesky users and their fickle minds. For instance, who would have thought that most people actually don't *want* video phones or flying cars or talking computers? Or at least, they don't want them enough to drive the technical development of these things, since standard phones, autos, and Windows seem to do the job well enough.
.Net web services demo! It will show you the current news and weather! OVER THE INTERNET! Oh, just install this 300MB library+runtime first. Ok, now install my 30MB client app. Oh, yeah, that didn't refresh properly, did it? Exit out and restart. Dang. [this is better than a browser how?]), and for most in-house developers it will be just another call to use instead of dlopen() to open shared routine. And until the Net becomes totally ubiquitous and telecom-reliable, I don't see many shrink-wrap developers linking in lots of remote Web Services on the fly, when most of that functionality can be placed locally during the install.
In other words, just because a technology looks like it's the "right" way to progress next, doesn't mean the market will allow it to move along.
I think we'll see this with Web Services (noted in the artcle as the current Next Big Thing). At it's core it's simply a formalization of how CGI developers have been working for years, yet most people and developers still prefer to use a generic web browser to diseminate most information, vs. using a custom client and a web service. Why? Because developers don't want to support another client program, and users don't want to download another one when they can just enter www.weather.com/my-zip-code to get the current weather forecast. I don't think it's been the lack of a formal parameter/return value standard that has held this idea back.
Don't get me wrong, I think Web Services are a nice tool, but unfortunately I see it as a problem looking for a solution. For most end-users it will mostly be a poor substitute for a URL (wait until your co-worker comes in to show you his spiffy new
Worst prediction: People would be talking to computers....Mr. Negroponte would welcome a breakthrough. "I've been wrong for a long time," he says. Isn't there a program called something like ViaVoice? Doesn't Office XP come with Voice Reconigtion? Doesn't Mac OS 9 (I believe) have voice passwords? Don't people use it? I don't think this is a worst prediction. Yes, the reconigtion program isn't that great, but it is getting better and better. Where has this guy been living (and what computer has he been using) to say that he is wrong?
O, and btw, don't we all talk to computers even if we don't have voice reconigtion? "Come on, you can do it", "Stupid Windows", "Good job", "You stupid dimwit" are just some examples. This would be concidered talking to a computer. In light of that, talking to computers is done everyday almost by every person.
Most futurists follow the same "30-year rule" that science fiction writers follow: If you want to predict a sweeping change that will revolutionize everything, place it about 30 years in the future. If you doubt this, just look at virtually every mainstream sci-fi flick that takes place in the future. This might have started with George Orwell's "1984", first published in 1954.
I think people tend to come up with 30 years because (a) it sounds far away enough for anything to happen, and (b) it's soon enough that they might be alive to see it.
[obPrediction: by 2032, Slashdot will have its own TV show]
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
No doubt. Seems like every 6 months some website trots out "the experts" and sets them loose on the next big thing.
Well, here's my prediction:
Computers won't change much in the next 10 years. Oh, they may change shape, or form, but they will still do the same thing:
connect us to people and information
Side note, yeah, we are supposed to have all these cool tech advances, and we can't even get cheap broadband access in urban areas. Please. Get the stuff we have currently working well, then we will worry about the flying cars
Sent from your iPad.
When it comes to making predictions regarding technology, it is typically much safer to predict the possibility of something than the impossibility of it. Human ingenuity is truly amazing.
Perhaps that's what makes all these old predictions about talking, thinking computers so intriguing. Computers have advanced in so many ways as people have boldly predicted (perhaps the most astounding of which is that Moore's Law continues to hold true), yet AI has accomplished very little. And unfortunately, speech recognition and AI (which might be the same) are probably the most important for making computers truly useful for the ordinary end users that don't have to time to learn complex interfaces.
This sig is false.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
... that some overzealous Microsoft basher is soon about to quote Bill Gates on the 640k limit, even tough it has been shown recently that he never uttered these words.
Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law: When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Each of them predict an outcome, while the coin is in the air.
10 of them are correct in that their predictions of either heads or tails came true. And they believe that their high level of intelligence led them to the correct conclusion.
These 10 geniuses are given HUGE book contracts for their obvious ability to tell the future.
Millions of other monkeys soon believe in SUPER 10s abilities and send these geniuses millions of dollars.
Things are looking good.
5 years pass. Another flipping of the coins is called for and the original SUPER 10 attempt to repeat their original success.
But NONE of them succeed. In fact only 7 monkeys predict the correct outcome of their coin toss.
The original SUPER 10 retire to the Caymon Islands.
First off: you don't use your computer for anything intensive, do you? I use it for 3d modeling and animation, and boy-oh-boy do I need the extra cpu-power, the extra ram, that superduper new gfx card. At least, if I want to move the objects at anything but frame-by-frame on my monitor.
As for the HD...yeah, I photoshop my own textures. You bet that I need that HD-space for something else than divx'.
And all this certainly comes in handy when I have to do some finite-element analysis for school (or any other simulation for that matter).
Added bonus: I can play computer games with realistic graphics on it, too!
Now, secondly; there is more to life than the computer itself. Read the very last line of the article...damn if that's not true, and maybe the most important piece of the whole chebang (sp?). Also, the bottom-up telephone system...that got me thinking bigtime. I like that idea.
Oh, and just to prove I can't count, here's number three; you want new stuff? There's whole area's of the universe not understood yet, where breakthroughs are coming (just you wait). Just a couple are: the nature of time (we still have no clue!), human nature in mind and body (what is the mind?, the soul? and what about huge breakthroughs in understanding becoming possible by biochips?). There's loads more, all only coming within reach because technology is making it possible for us to simulate/look at/describe these systems and phenomena.
Trust me, we don't know nothing yet.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
> I only see technological developments resulting
> in more an more human misery for the majority of > humanity.
Which is why you are using a computer, one of the jewels in the crown of technology.
You nature-is-good people are a bunch of hypocritical morons. Go back and live in nature, without antibiotics, anesthetics, heating, and so many of the horrors of technology.