With PCs disappearing from desks but technology showing up everywhere else, computing will only get more personal in the coming decades.
The future ain't what it used to be. In the pre-PC era, futurists predicted huge changes in transportation. By 2008, they prophesied, we would be flitting about with personal jetpacks and taking holidays on the moon. But the communications revolution spurred by personal computers and the internet wasn't on anyone's radar.
Now the technology landscape is once again on the verge of change - change that will transport us to places few people have imagined. We know that computers will be vastly more powerful, mobile and connected. But soon we'll struggle to tell where the technology ends and the rest of our life begins.
Digital technology will become firmly embedded in advanced devices that deliver information and entertainment to our homes and to our pockets, in sensors that monitor our environment from within the walls and floors of our homes and in chips that deliver medicine and augment reality inside our bodies.
This shiny, happy future may come at a cost, with experts warning of security and privacy issues. So let's hope our jetpacks come with seat belts. It's going to be a wild ride.
The incredible disappearing PC
Whether you've got a PC on your desk in 2018 will be a matter of choice. If so, it'll be vastly more powerful than your current PC, thanks to advances in nanotechnology, says Doug Tougaw, an engineering professor at Valparaiso University.
"We're getting closer to our goal of creating computers that are a thousand times faster and smaller and use one-thousandth of the energy of today's computers," Tougaw reports.
"As processors get smaller, they'll be embedded into more things. We'll also use standard-size machines packed with hundreds of chips. So we'll have very intelligent consumer products and unbelievably powerful PCs."
Computers using nanotechnology will debut in about five years. Five to 10 years after that, silicon will reach a point at which quantum mechanics won't allow chip pathways to get any smaller, so electric-current-based PCs will give way to optical PCs that transmit streams of light instead of electrons, or to quantum computers that rely on the strange physics of atomic particles to deliver processing brawn, Tougaw says.
William Halal, professor emeritus at George Washington University, says: "Starting around the year 2018, we'll have optical computers that operate at the speed of light, sending thousands of message streams down a single channel."
Most of tomorrow's CPU muscle will go towards making the user interface seamless and intuitive. Keyboards and mice may persist, but they'll become secondary to voice and gesture.
Body language
Gesture-based interfaces are catching on fast. The Nintendo Wii's gesture-based controller is one example. And the iPhone's touchscreen responds differently to finger taps and swipes - Apple uses similar technology in its MacBook Air's touchpad. GestureTek uses the input from cameraphones to deliver gesture control.
Freed from the keyboard, you'll be able to talk or gesture to your PC from virtually any display in your home. Or you may carry your pocket-sized PC with you and beam the image to a nanocomputer embedded in the nearest wall-sized screen.
Paper-thin displays are inching closer to reality too. Late last year, Sony released its 11in XEL-1 organic LED high-definition TVs (Oled HDTVs) and, at January's Consumer Electronics Show, the company presented a prototype 27in model.
Meanwhile, what you see onscreen will look a lot more like real life than in present-day 3D virtual worlds, Halal predicts. "When you want to buy a book, instead of going to Amazon's home page, you'll be greeted by a virtual salesperson," Halal says. "The avatar will find the book you're looking for and conduct the transaction, just as you would experience with a real person."
Michael Liebhold, senior researcher at California's Institute for the Future, says your PC may project a holograph so you can manipulate files and objects with your hands.
For many people, the PC of the future will be a dumb terminal, with storage, software and processing power distributed across an internet 'cloud'. Amazon, Dell and IBM have introduced cloud services for businesses, and Google and Zoho now serve up web applications to consumers.
In years to come you'll enjoy ubiquitous internet access, perhaps using part of today's TV spectrum. Such access will deliver your 'desktop' from a portable device or internet terminal. Instead of a password, you'll provide a fingerprint, voice or retinal scan.
"Your identity becomes your access point to your files and apps," says Patrick Tucker of the World Future Society. "Your digital life will follow you around like a shadow."
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