Ten years from now, computers will be at home in our pockets and inside
our television, coffee makers, and almost every where else as well. They
will pack vastly more computing muscle into tinier, lighter packages.
If the most optimistic computer scientists are correct, tomorrow’s
shirt pocket computer could hold a billion bytes (equivalent to 2,000
books) in its memory and run at 50 million times the speed of today’s
fastest personal computers. We have no idea what to do with all that
computing power. We doubt that anyone else knows, either. Even the
lowest estimates of the advances coming in the next decade will give
tomorrow’s computers a level of utility and convenience we can only
imagine today.
To put it succinctly, the future of computing is “Convergence and
Digital Everything”.
Convergence is the grand coming together of technologies that used to
be separate, such as computers and telephones. Already, the cheapest way
to make a long distance telephone call is to fire up your computer and log
on to the Interment. Several companies provide telephone style headsets
for personal computers, together with the software needed to operate
them. At this early stage of development, the sound quality is not yet up to
that of a normal telephone, but the price can not be beat: For about a half
a cent per minute, you can use this system to converse over the Internet
with anyone in the world London, Paris, Moscow, New Delhi.
But this is just the beginning of digital convergence. For years, most
of us have had there different sets of wires and cables entering our homes
and offices: one for electricity, one for conversation or computer data, and
one for news and entertainment. Recently some electric utilities have added a fourth set of lines that allow them to check our meter readings
remotely. When all of these signals are digitized, it becomes possible to
carry TV pictures on the telephone wires, computer, data on the TV cable,
or both of term on the electric utility’s meter checking lines. That’s
convergence.
“Digital Everything” is an even simpler notion. Computers are
becoming so small, powerful, and cheap that soon almost any object more
complex than pottery will be equipped with its own brain. Lights will
adjust themselves to illuminate your book or keep glare off the CV
(computer/television) screen. Intruder alarms will know enough not to call
the police just because you left your keys on the dresser. Toasters will
learn whether you like your English muffins lightly browned or charred
beyond recognition.
Let us take a closer look at that smart toaster and its smarter
companion appliances. Imagine a stove that arrives preprogrammed with
all the recipes from your favorite restaurant or from a classic cook book
like The Joy of Cooking. It will also have a ROM card reader to let you
add your own recipes. Just tell the stove what you want for dinner (likė
most computers, it will understand spoken instructions), and it will display
a list of ingredients on its flat panel screen.
The smart stove will announce when the skillet is hot enough to start
the stir fry vegetables, prompt you when the pasta is al dente, and give
fair warning when the next step is required. It will sense when the soup is
beginning to boil and automatically reduce the heat to a slow simmer. It
will schedule all of your meal’s courses to be ready, perfectly, at the time
you want to serve it. Over time, it will also remember how all the
members of the household like their food cooked rare, medium, or well
done. The smart stove will no doubt have many other “intelligent”
functions that have not yet occurred to us.
Fifteen year from now, product designers will still be figuring ou
startling ways to use the new intelligence of everyday appliances. No one
of these innovations will change our lives, but as the artifacts around us
gradually learn to accommodate our individual needs, the world will
become a friendlier, more convenient place in which to live. FASTER COMPUTERS
In 15 years, computer chips will be about 15,000 times more potent
than the processors that power today’s cutting edge personal computers.
Tomorrow’s typical desktop computer will finish in an hour a task that
today would keep our most powerful desktop computers running 24 hours
a day for two years.
How? For one thing, engineers will be able to pack more circuit
elements more efficiently on tiny chips. This allows data to move between
the circuit elements faster.
A computer program consists of an enormous list of minute steps;
early computer chips processed instructions one at a time until the
program was complete. It was a lot like trying to move the entire
population of New York City thorough a single subway turnstile.
In recent years, computer engineers have worked out ways around
that bottleneck. “Pipeline” processors move several instructions thorough
the system at once, opening more turnstiles. “Superscalar” processors can
perform several instructions at once, in effect stuffing several people
thorough each turnstile at the same time. Both processing techniques
multiply the machine’s speed. Current processors carry out there to six
instructions at one time. In 15 years, the number is likely to be several
dozen. These incremental advances alone will make tomorrow’s
computers several hundred times more powerful.
We are less optimistic about parallel processing, another strategy from
which researchers have long expected much greater advances in computing
speed. This technique aims to break a problem into many smaller tasks,
perform each one simultaneously on its own processor, and then
recombine the results of the individual computations into a single answer.
In theory, this should be the ultimate upgrade.
However, distributing each program among many processors has
proved to be almost as hard as passing one of our New Yorkers through
several turnstiles at once. It is difficult enough to separate most computing
problems into easy to process fragments, and that is only the first hurdle
that programmers face. Distributing those many parts to individual
processors, keeping the subcomputers in step with each other, and then
reassembling their answers into one grand result has proved all but impossible, save for those few specialized chores that lend themselves t
subdivision. These problems will not be solved until some one achieves the
kind of conceptual break thorough whose appearance no one can predict,
We suspect that programmers will still be struggling with them 15
from now.
NEW KINDS OF COMPUTERS
On the other hand, even the most super and then some, computers that
engineers come up with may already be obsolete. The true break thorough
technologies will be ones that give us totally new kinds of computers that
are faster, certainly, but that also handle certain kinds of problems more
efficiently or that could be built at a price that would put one in almost
everyone’s pocket.
Let’s look at three possibilities: DNA computers, quantum
computers, and optical computers.
DNA Computers. The newest and most revolutionary break thorough
in computing burst onto the scene entirely without warning. One night in
the summer of 1993, computer scientist Leonard Adelman was reading
James Watson’s classic textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene. Adelman
was fascinated by the parallels he saw between genes and the computers he
dealt with each day. Computers manipulate information that is encoded as
binary numbers strings of zeros and ones. The genes, he saw, manipulate
information that is encoded as strings of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and
thymine, the four nucleotides that combine to form DNA.
To Adelman, this insight was more than an analogy it was something
he could build. To test his prototype of A DNA computer, Adelman posed
a difficult mathematical challenge known as the traveling salesman
problem: What is the shortest route among a group of cities, not all of
which are connected by a direct road, that lets a salesman pass through
each city exactly one?
Adelman chose to work with seven cities interconnected by 14 roads
He assigned a code to each city and to each possible leg of the trip, for 21
unique sequences of nucleotides to represent all the factors involved in his
problem. Then he mixed the snippets of DNA in solution and allowed
them to react for a few days. To read the answer, he simply analyzed the
resulting DNA. The shortest strand that contained the codes for b
intermediate stops represented the answer. On its first try, the DNA computer solved its problems fast than any electronic computer could have
done. it even used less engery.
One problem with the system is the fact that DNA is prone to errors;
worse, it took the DNA computer only moments to come up with its
answer, but it took Adelman a week to purify the DNA that held the
salesman’s route.
However, such problems may soon be solved. so far, this technology
is too new for us to make any firm prediction about where it will lead. In
another five years, though, we should have a good idea of how well it is
working out.
Quantum computers. Scientists have been toying with the idea of
quantum computers since the early 1980’s, but it is only in the last few
years that they have begun to take them seriously.
Computer designers first started thinking about quantum theory when
they realized how their circuit elements were shrinking. If you make the
transistors on a microchip small enough, a strange thing happens:
Electrons disappear from your memory circuits and reappear some where
else, without ever having existed any where between the two position.
Imagine “beaming” our new Yorkers instantly from the Bronx to Coney
Island without going through turnstiles or using he subway at all!
It was a disturbing thought for engineers whose machines required
exact control over the electrons that powered them. But theoreticians
wondered whether there might be some way to harness such strange
phenomena.
By the mid 1990s, some physicists had worked out ways to get
quantum devices to carryout basic logic operations in the lab. it now seems
possible that someone, someday, will produce a machine based on
quantum theory. A decade ago, not even the theoreticians held out much hope.
Optical computers. Optical computers could well be in general use
just 10 years from now, with overwhelming benefits. Optical computers
will be faster, because light moves so much faster than electrons mired in silicon.
Optical computers offer a radical change in the way information is
handled: While electronic computers work with single bits of information optical computers can process whole image
at one time. For image processing, especially, the result is a radic
increase in computing speed. For example, computer scientist Kris
processor
electrons
Johnson of the University of Colorado designed an optical
cloud identify cancer cells on a Pape smear. For a standard
computer, this task would have required a major commitment of proce
time and memory and still would have meant a lengthy wait for
results. The optical processor did the job virtually instantaneously.
computers
Like many other advances in technology, converting entire
to work with light has proved more difficult than scientists once imagine
Even if the vision of all or mostly optical computers could materialize
the next 10 years, it would force computer companies to discard a
enormous investment in the factories that make memory chips and hard
drives something they’d be unlikely to do.
But specialized optical components will almost surely have arrived in
the next 10 years, and computers that are mostly optical will be nearing
the market. The result could be shirt-pocket computers with even greater
power than we can now imagine.
Other types of breakthroughs will also be needed to make all of these
technologies truly work for us. Software to run them needs to be
developed. In this area, we see only two major innovations that are likely
to pay off in the early twenty-first century.
One is object-oriented programming (OOP) systems, which are the
building blocks of the software world. Instead of writing each segment of
every new piece of software from scratch, OOP programmers create
reusable modules, or “objects”, that can be knit together. Instead of
creating the entire project from a blank page, the programmer need only
write the links between these objects, and perhaps a few lines of high
specialized instructions unique to that project. The potential savings a
time and reduction of errors are obvious benefits.
The new computers will bring chaos to the workplace, just as the
predecessor technologies have done. In the past 20 years, assembly line
robots have displaced well over half of the human workers who onc
looked to factory jobs for a middle class living.
Technology has destroyed the jobs of countless mid level executives
as computerized management methods allow the survivors to oversee up 21 subordinates instead of only six. computerization has also made it
increasingly easy for one company to absorb its rivals, sending still more
people to the unemployment lines. Recently, computers have begun to
streamline operations in the service industries, the last stronghold of
human labour. Again, the opportunities for human workers are shrinking.
Cheaper and vastly more powerful computers can only hasten this
trend. Who needs to pay a human sales person when business customers
can e-mail their orders directly to the computer that does the accounting
and controls the production equipment? Or when intelligent machines can
make an effective sales call to new retail customers? Even writers and
artists may be in danger. Already, some Hollywood screen writers rely on
their software to construct salable plot outlines, and one experimental
program reportedly can write believable dialogue by reweaving fragments
from real conversations. And who needs human doctors when the next
generation of expert systems will be able to make most diagnoses?
For a time, the health care industry can absorb many of the people
displaced by this new, more capable brand of automation. After all, sick
people still need human hands to tend them. But soon, fewer people will
be sick enough to require their care.
As a result, most of us will spend our entire working lives bouncing
from one career to the next, scrambling to learn the skills of a new
profession before some computer snatches away our current livelihood.
The second key innovation for making computer work for us is
artificial intelligence (AI). In the years to come, AI will get a boost of
interest from researchers, thanks to the growing power of computers. It
takes a lot of memory and processing capacity to mimic the human mind.
Ten years from now, we will all have computers potent enough to
incorporate very sophisticated forms of AI.
Future products must be both powerful and easy to use. They must
take orders from people who are to interested in learning complex
commands, or even in using a mouse to pick them from a menu. They
must be, in short, intelligent. There are two ways to create machine
intelligence of a high order. One is to give your computer “common
sense” by providing a context, the kind of background information that
enables people to interpret new data. The other is to give it the ability to
learn. Researchers are hard at work on both approaches, and this work is
likely to converge. . dedicated learning software. Our machines will behave in ways that s
In the future, computers will combine vast stores of context w
human, if sometimes a bit stilted and too literal minded. If we give the
knowledge of us. More often than not, they will get it right, and as the
an ambiguous or open ended order, they will interpret it according to the
gain experience they will do better still. In 15 years, we may already have
begun to take these intelligent, helpful, and artificial companions for
granted.
DIGITIZED LIVES
The real question is, What are we going to do with all these new
electronic abilities?
Scientist may need a super computer’s power to simulate the
interactions of atomic particles or the results of a novel chemical reaction
The telephone company may need twenty first century super computers to
keep its lines operating. Movie makers will use all the power they can g
of a life like animation resurrect the stars of another age. But what ele
can we get out of all this new technology?
Entertainment is one obvious answer. The media now promise us (or
perhaps threaten us) with 500 channels of cable television, or its digitized
equivalent. This should be enough to keep even the most ardent channel
surfer perpetually busy in front of the tube. Already, the Internet’s news
groups and Web pages absorb a large and growing part of computer users
leisure time.
Thanks to the growing power of personal computers, we may soon
begin to make much more of our own entertainment. Computerized sound
synthesizers already are popular among technologically savvy adolescents
with a taste for music. Soon, any desktop computer will be equipped for
life like animation and video editing. Just install the necessary software,
and the average teen will be able to create digital “films” that would
challenge today’s professionals. We know several who would love to have
that power now.
COMPUTERS AS MEDIA BUTLERS
What we really expect from the enormous new power of tomorrow’s
computers is convenience. It will appear in computers themselves first
processors will understand our text well enough to notice our errors – such Spreadsheets will recognize that a calculation can be performed, but does
as that we promised to discuss four major topics but only mentioned there.
not make sense in the context of what we are trying to accomplish. And
intelligent agents will hunt for information on the Internet, schedule our
appointments by negotiating with out colleagues agents, and perhaps even
handle our routine shopping.
One of those agents will inhabit your television (or the future
computer integrated version of it). The saving grace of having all those
new cable channels is that we will never have to watch them or even scan
TV Guide the size of the manhattan telephone directory. Our intelligent
television will watch all those channels for us. It will also keep a
continuous watch on the Internet, scanning the news groups and Web.
pages we prefer and occasionally adding a new service to its list.
And it will know what interests us. Whenever we check in with the
machine, it will deliver our e-mail, flag interesting items, from the Net,
and offer a short list of television programs it has stored for possible
viewing. If some new topic has caught our attention, we will be able to
ask it whether it knows of any programs or Net sites dealing with that
subject. Like all our other appliances, the “media butler” will learn and
grow continuously better at meeting our personal needs.
Telephones will survive, not so much because we need them – their
functions could easily be built into the media butler – but because we find
it easiest to compartmentalise some operations. The growing power of
computers will change them as well. It will not matter much whether
telephones are portable or hardwired. They will route calls over the same
network of wires, fibre -optic cables, and satellites that carries our data
whatever gets our message to its destination most efficiently. Wherever we
go, which ever telephone we use, our personal phone number will follow
us, much as calling card and other special service numbers do today. The
telephone itself will filter out unwelcome callers, intercept calls when we
are too busy to receive them, and deliver special messages when it
recognizes a friend’s voice on the line.
The phone system will perform one more service as well: It will
translate our conversations in real time, so that we can talk with some one
who speaks only French, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese – any of the seven
or eight most common languages without bothering to learn anything but
our native tongue. Most of these chores are theoretically possible even compute
with today’s tec nology. In 10 years, the growing power of
network built into your house or apartment and – if you do not yet wort
All of these fur ctions, and many others, will be united by a local a
home able to link itself with the network at your office your me
butler, lighting system, and appliances will not just contain their ow
Intelligence, cut off from the rest of the world; they will share
information. When you sit down to read in the den, the lights wil
automatically focus on the page and slightly dim the rest of the room
They will also notify your telephone where to find you, so that when you
get a call only the nearest extension rings and no one else in the house
disturbed. Or, if you prefer, the media butler will tell the phone to hold al
calls. Later, it will mention that the telephone has a message for you-or
deliver the message itself. And so on.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the famed Media Lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, once suggested that if you wan
yesterday’s closing price on the Dow Jones industrial average served
with you breakfast, you could have it automatically branded on your toast
No doubt he was half joking, but an intelligent toaster linked to your
media butler could do it easily. As they learn what we find most
convenient, these increasingly brainy artifacts will automatically find ways
to insulate us from the endless inconveniences and irritations that have
become inescapable parts of life in the late twentieth century.
We see the early twenty-first century as a kind of Wonderland, in
which our possessions talk to us and to each other. But unlike the Mad
hatter’s teapot, they will usually make perfect sense. And unlike Hal, the
computer antagonist of 2001, when they act behind our backs they will be
plotting to do us good.