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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."
...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.
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.
+1 Overrated
Money for nothing, pix for free
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?