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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
What's he talking about? I talk to computers all the time, especially Windows machines. "What the hell do you mean the zip drive can't be found?! It's right there!"
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson Senior, Chairman of IBM, 1943
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Like Microsoft collapsing in 6 months back in 2000, and more recently, Windows becoming obsolete with the advent of the new $299 Linux boxes from WalMart.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Thurow is an economist, not a scientist or engineer, which is why his predictions about biotech are particularly bad. The science is on the edge of a lot of new understanding and breakthroughs, but that will only put us up against the really interesting and hard problems. As if we would be able to find genes that more or less directly influence something as subtle as IQ.
I find the predictions about the future importance of web services and the junk about "insight" to be particularly inane. On the first, nobody should forget that GM and Ford are still about the only companies that represent a percentage of the U.S. economy. Manufacture of physical goods (and commodities production, etc.) will continue to be the drivers of economies.
In my opinion, the most important trend is a favorite of this forum. The growth factors that have been working for Free software are fundamentally exponential, even if the constant factor is small. If it isn't killed off by legal/social influence of current big players, and I don't think this is likely if it is even possible, then the exponential term will eventually dominate.
When this plays out, the companies that make their reputations by being the best at efficiently building and servicing products that are mostly designed in the "Creative Commons". People will pay for quality in goods and services, and there will always be value in good execution. Customers do not value "insight" as described in one prediction. They find this sort of thing invasive and manipulative, and you won't be able to keep it secret.
It was when I was chasing down some secondary links from the GNUradio interview that I came across the stuff about the value of a network increasing at greater than linear rates. You get O(N) for broadcast networks, O(N^2) in peer to peer networks, but the exponential (O(2^N)) comes in when you have group forming networks (GFN).
When you think about it, this is what drives the GPL software phenominon. Every project fork or new initiative forms a new group or groups in the network, and every project is a nucleus for new group formation. The only way this could be stopped is to destroy to possibility of the group forming that leads to the exponential growth. While this might be possible, our robust institutions that support free speech make this very difficult if not impossible.
So my prediction is that Linux on the desktop will overtake Windows in the next ten years, and the RIAa and MPAA will finally lose out to the best interests of the actual artists they claim to support. Also, derivitives of GNUradio will be core technology in establishing cooperative wireless mesh networks. This is the only prediction of any of the pundits in the article that will come true.
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?