12 Crackpot Ideas That Could Transform Tech

InfoWorldMike passed us a link to an entertaining article with a sort of 'top 12' innovative technologies that could change the world. Some of the techs include solid-state drives, holographic and phase-change storage, artificial intelligence, e-books, desktop web apps, and quantum computing/cryptography. For each of these technologies, expert observers weigh in on the potentials and pitfalls of these disciplines. Here are Esther Lim's comments on e-books: "Another issue, besides the prohibitive cost and cumbersome nature of e-documents, concerns the vast portion of the contracts that were signed and agreed upon before e-books came onto the scene ... That raises questions not just in terms of what rights the user has, but what rights the publisher has vis-à-vis the copyright holder." We've discussed almost all of these technologies on the site at one point or another. Which is the most important? Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'?

Comments

Solid-State Drives

[goldspider]

I think solid-state drives is going to have the most immediate impact. Their potential includes:

- Near-instant data access (think boot-up times)
- Lower power consumption
- Lower failure rate
- Many others I'm sure I'm unaware of.

I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[smenor]

I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology.

I'd hardly call anything on that list a "crackpot" technology.

AI, quantum computing, holographic storage, e-books - they're all either currently being researched by a ton of academics and legitimate businesses, or (as is the case for e-books) they're actually on the market.

Where's the anti-gravity, and free-energy? How can they even make a list of crackpot technologies and leave them out?

Re:Solid-State Drives

[jcr]

I agree. We've already seen flash RAM beat the micro drives in CF cards, and the advantages of doing away with moving parts (and with them, the inevitable mechanical failures) are compelling. Moore's law will do the driving, we'll have solid-state laptops in another year or so.

-jcr

Re:Solid-State Drives

[eln]

They aren't crackpot ideas, but they are the same tired list of "tech that will change the world" that so-called "experts" trot out every so often so that they can appear relevant and sell more magazine articles and books. My take on a few of these:

e-books have been tried, and they've failed. They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that.

Web-based apps aren't there yet, and will probably never get there until we have protocols that will give you the rich API that coding directly for the desktop will give you. Faking it in Javascript just isn't going to cut it.

True AI has been at least 30 years away for the past 50 years. It's an open question as to whether or not we can ever really get there, or if getting there is even desirable.

The Semantic Web is an interesting idea in theory, but I think the article is hopelessly optimistic thinking that anywhere near a majority of web developers will buy in to it, considering the work involved. It suffers from a chicken and egg problem: it's useless unless everyone buys in, but no one will buy in while its still useless.

As for Project Blackbox, I took a tour of it when it came to the local Sun campus, and it is actually a very impressive piece of engineering. Its uses are probably very limited, but the engineers who worked on it definitely deserve some serious geek points.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[mcvos]

True AI has been at least 30 years away for the past 50 years. It's an open question as to whether or not we can ever really get there, or if getting there is even desirable.

If you mean Strong AI, then most serious researchers have long abandoned that goal. The past 50 years have mostly taught us how complex intelligence really is, and that we still have no good definition of the concept. And as long as we don't know what intelligence in humans really is, how can we create it in computers?

Instead, most researchers are focusing on small, limited aspects of intelligence, like the ability to interpret sounds (including speech), images (handwriting, or following a road in the rain), playing chess, medical or other diagnosis, translation, etc. Many of those are here already in some form of another. We'll see a lot more of this in the near future. But if you want Daneel Olivaw, I'm afraid you'll need a couple of centuries patience.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[ePhil_One]

I used to have a pair of old Apple II hard drives that cost an airline $5,000 each. So the cost was $1,000 a MB (thats right, they were a whopping 5Mb (in an age where the average PC had 16k and maxed at 64k (the glories of 8 bit computing), that was serious storage. So in a few short years (ok, maybe 10 :), your solid state storage had 25x more capacity at half the cost per MB.

Solid state has been around for a while, and has slowly been reaching into the mainstream. While it will be 20-30 years before it replaces disk for primary storage, its come from the stratosphere of the high end to replace floppy, Zip, Jazz, and other portable disk technolgies, and will soon embed itself into the hard drive as a cache for your boot OS. How soon until we just have a 20GB Flash C: drive and a spinning disk TB class D: drive for the rest of your data? The capacity of spinning disk drives is racing past the utility point for the majority of users, honestly my corporate desktop users would be fine with a 10GB disk partition.

Sony and ebooks

[WolfWalker545]

A problem with Sony's reader is that when one publisher (Baen) contacted them about software to convert existing ebooks, Sony started talking about wanting royalties per book. So while Baen publishes their books in a variety of formats, don't expect them to publish in Sony's format. But Baen already sees more ebook sales than they do sales to Canada, as an example.

The near term important ones

[sjbe]

Some of these are great ideas but the technology is in the (possibly distant) future (i.e. superconductivity at room temp) or are government/corporate desires that will be resisted until their more intrusive/abusive issues are addressed (ebooks, total information awareness).

The only ones I see that are near term likely and widely relevant:

2. Solid-state drives
Already here in some applications. Just needs a touch more capacity (I think around 32GB is the tipping point) and economies of scale to bring the price to reasonable levels. This will have a tremendous impact on laptops enabling them to be smaller, lighter and more durable. I would love to replace my laptop hard drive with something solid state. Damn thing is fragile enough as it is.

3. Autonomic computing
Think about all the spam, viruses, etc. We're already building what amounts to an immune system for our computer networks. It just needs to become a little more automated and clever. IBM is actually right in that it will be an incremental addition to existing technologies. It's not going to be a top-down mandated thing but rather a collection of technologies to deal with specific issues which (ideally) can work with each other.

4. DC Power
I've wondered for some time why we don't have a standardized DC outlet for home use. Have 1 big efficient transformer instead of 50 little inefficient power bricks. The downside is that you are introducing a single point of failure but it's a well understood and pretty reliable technology. Every circuit board requires DC anyway so why not have a standard DC along side AC in the house or office? May require some government assistance and/or standards organizations to make it work but it's a good idea. I'm pretty sure we'll see this in data centers sooner rather than later if the power savings really are there.

8. Desktop web applications
Gmail and web calendaring have made their way into my every day tool chest. It's only natural that we'll start to make these applications more accessible via traditional applications.

Crackpot

[ObiWanStevobi]

Still to inside-the-box for me. Personally, I'd think infinite improbability has much more interesting ramifications. If only there wasn't that darn Total Existence Failure thingy to worry about. Technical enterprise, who cares? I'm talking about undergarments suddenly jumping three feet to the left.

Perhaps we can start out small and work on a bistromathic processor and a finite improbability drive and work our way up from there.

Re:I also have a crockpot idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace all RAM with cheese.

Some observations from experience:

• Swiss cheese loses about 10-25% of the bits.
• Parmesan has really long access time.
• Cottage cheese is really fast, but don't expect your data in linear order.
• Gorgonzola will make your computer literally smell like bird crap.
• Brie is currently too expensive to be economically viable.
• American can be stacked up to 50-100 slices high. This increases bandwidth but requires a large case.
• Velveeta doesn't perform as well as the others listed, but it retains its performance the best, so by the second or third day it becomes the clear winner.

I hope this helps!

ebooks will probably a mess

[SmallFurryCreature]

It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.

The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.

• Unlimited production runs from 0 to infinite with NO waste, no production time, no transportation issues.
• Infinite back catalog, again with virtually no-costs.
• Zero risk of a bad product being shipped with costly recalls/replacement.

Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.

Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!

A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)

And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.

So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.

WTF?

ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.

Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the .lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?

I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.

Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.

Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.

This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.

The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.

Flying cars!

[SnarfQuest]

What about flying cars? I've been promised my own flying car "real soon now" for ages! If they can't give me a simple thing like my own flying car, how can you expect them to do any of these other complicated things?

Real transformation

[John Bayko]

Real transforming ideas are things that come from off center, and seem silly and easily dismissed until they're inexplicably established and vital. Some examples:

• Queue a file to be copied later to another computer. Why do that, when you can manually make the connection and copy it now? What's the point of adding extra automation that just delays things? Because the extra automation can be used to add routing, addressing, notification, etc. Email.
• View an ordinary formatted text file (maybe a few pictures thrown in), but on another computer. That makes no sense, to rely on an unreliable and slow network connection and on the other computer to be up, when you can just copy the file (or have it emailed to you) so you can look at it whenever you want. Besides, how do you even know how to locate the file? Except the protocol for identifying and exchanging this information allows web applications, and you get the HTTP and the World Wide Web.
• GUIs. Using a little wand or ball or mouse to move shapes around on a screen is okay for specialised applications, but computer data is numbers and words, which are all abstract and have no relationship to things on a screen. Besides, you'd have to give these controller gadgets to everyone in the world with a keyboard already, who wants that expense? Besides, keyboards are always more efficient because you can keep your hands in place. GUIs for real (number and word) applications existed for decades before they caught on.
• Apple iPod - less capable player, relied on PC software for functionality. Well, PC software has a better interface and makes things easier overall - plus the iTunes music store.

I predict the next big thing will be something along these lines. Maybe already here, but dismissed as equally silly.

• A display-neutral protocol that lets applications run on a server with the GUI on a user's screen. Not pixel-oriented bandwidth hogs like X windows or remote desktop, but something based on well established GUI components and window layout. Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP) is a much overlooked example.
• Deductive databases. A reasonable relational database with foreign key constraints means that if you select only the data and tables you want, it should be easy enough for the database to select your joins for you. It's an NP problem, but lots of caching could fix most of that. Oh, plus SQL sucks, and it's nearly criminal that people think SQL and relational database mean the same thing.
• Statistical text analysis. The very beginning has started with SPAM filters and Baysian models. Spammers are starting to figure out how to fight them, but variable length Markov chains have the potential to start to glean more meaning from the text and make better decisions. This could lead to the ability to extract common concepts from phrases or sentences which are different, but mean the same thing. This would allow processing text based on chunks of meaning rather than pattern recognition - far from artificial intelligence, but opens up the possibility of a lot of new very high level applications.

There's a few thoughts. Any other things that seem trivial and with vastly overlooked potential?