March of the Cyber Sapiens

Moore's Law, Murphy's law - and technology.

Today, when even the recent past seems blurry at times, contemplating technology's evolution over the next 60 years can sound ridiculously abstract. But it is also true that today's must-have technologies are probably headed straight for tomorrow's trash cans, rendering no scientific method for identifying their replacements.

Think back five or six years to when most people did not use search engines. A case in point: Google is just seven years old but it's hard to imagine life before it. Just two years back, social networks, blogs, podcasts "" these terms did not exist. Broadband has been here for a while and already dial-up

Internet seems (at least to high-speed users) like a throwback to a primeval era. So, by year 2067, what all could change? Or not change?

For starters, we won't see commercial time machines or flying cars in homes. Fixed telephony will not be extinct, laptops will talk to you "" in fact, next-generation notebooks with detachable mini displays are just around the corner.

The PC has been the window to the digital world for 25 years, but ways of accessing information will continue to evolve. Computers will become more specialised and mobile phones will come free of cost. The money, for mobile vendors, could be compensated by advertisers who would, in turn, monetise costs from from the bundled, branded content on mobile phones.

An intelligent traffic-transport system could be in place. Each car will likely be fitted with a tagging device such as a Radio Frequency Identification tag or some advanced version of the RFID technology.

These chips would send out information when they pass a reader (alongside roads). By tracking every vehicle, a virtual travel agent could spot heavy traffic areas ahead and route you round them.

At the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, researchers are conjuring up a vision of a one-person pod car that will be available to rent. "As it is," claim researchers, "70 per cent of car journeys transport just one person, so scaling down cars to the right size for the journey and using lightweight materials would cut down emissions and congestion."

Video conferencing would be spoken about in history books. Instead, a virtual projection mechanism that could beam life-size, 3-dimensional images with the appropriate sound effects would hold centrestage.

For instance, you could be in Bhatinda or New York and yet your target audience would see you swish around, see the local background behind you, and "virtually" the two parties would be with in front of one another, as if in person. No need to have a technician around to set up equipment, nor an elaborate system to master "" most personal technology would be on broadband networks.

So, as we go into the future, we would have images written directly on to our retina from our eyeglasses that will solve the problem of wanting big displays while having tiny receiver devices. High definition virtual displays would be hovering in air or take over your whole visual field of view and put you in a virtual reality environment. That's Teleportex "" commercially, the most promising communication tool of tomorrow.

Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, also the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, has documented his vision for the future. He surmises, "By 2020, computational power sufficient to simulate the human brain "" about 10 million billion calculations per second "" will be available for $1000. The software will take a decade longer, but we are making exponential gains in reverse engineering regions of the brain. As a result, by the late 2020s, the tool kit we use in artificial intelligence will include all the processes involved in human intelligence." In effect, we will no longer be Homo Sapiens but probably evolve into Cyber Sapiens.

One thing is quite apparent: that most people buy a device for a particular purpose and they neither want nor care about the extra capabilities.

Simplicity-minded gadget makers, like Apple Computer's iPod and now the iPhone, are often cited as a model of the simpler-is-better ethos. Just as people didn't buy iPods for $10,000, which is what it would have cost them 10 years ago, or for that matter broadband applications.

Another trend that has helped scientists is the increasing availability of tremendous amounts of computer power at hardly any cost. One megahertz of processing power, which cost more than $7,000 in 1970, can now be purchased for just pennies.

A Rs 24,000 hard drive can hold a terabyte (one trillion bytes) of data, enough to store everything you read (including e-mails, web pages, papers and books), all the music you purchase, eight hours of speech and 10 pictures a day for the next 60 years.

Thus, if current trends continue, within a decade you will be able to carry the same amount of information in your mobile phone's flash memory, while connecting wirelessly to a 4-terabyte drive worth Rs 4,000 on your PC. In 20 years Rs 24,000 will buy 250 terabytes of storage "" enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs.

This capacity should satisfy anyone's recording needs for more than 100 years. With the cost of technology coming down every six months, it's not a distant dream. These technologies will explode in the hi-tech landscape as new price performances take them to mass market levels. This will be the single most compelling factor for businesses to do better.

By now most of us have probably heard of Moore's Law, which is a shrinking of components on an integrated circuit so you can put twice as much every two years on a chip, and they run faster because they are smaller. More or less all gadgets and technologies would follow Moore's Law blindly.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, in his paper for The Scientific American wrote: "The emergence of the robotics industry is developing in much the same way that the computer business did 30 years ago. Think of the manufacturing robots currently used on automobile assembly lines as the equivalent of yesterday's mainframes."

If, today, robotic arms can perform surgery, surveillance robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan dispose of roadside bombs, and domestic robots vacuum the floor, imagine what it could evolve into tomorrow? Some of the world's best minds are trying to solve the toughest problems of robotics, such as visual recognition, navigation and machine learning. And they are succeeding.

Gates envisions "...a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present."

As we stand in the midst of this technology frenzy, it is hard to believe that the biggest breakthroughs are yet to appear. But that's the truth. They are yet to change the way you and I will work and play "" and mind you, the future is not going to be "trouble-free".