[extropy-chat] Predictions about the future of technology

[Jonathan Despres]

2005 We are approaching the dark ages point, when the rate of
innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages. We'll reach
that in 2024. (Jonathan Huebner)

2005 Within five years, every banking customer will have a banking
terminal in their pocket, drawing on the mainframe. (Arif Mohamed)

2004 By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will
predominate. (Ray Kurzweil)

2004 The mainframe is not going to die, and will be around for
basically forever. (John Swainson)

2004 By 2010, the average network connection speed to the home will be
10 times faster than today's [50Mbps] ADSL in Japan. (Kunio Nakamura)

2004 In five years, much of the business handled today by paper forms
scanning and data capture will have moved to XML data transmitted over
the Web. (Bruce Silver)

2004 Over the next couple of decades IT professionals will help
workers integrate computing and communications onto and into their
bodies and brains, with wearables and implants. (James Hughes)

2004 We're going to have computers, not too long from now, that don't
have screens and where the information is presented as a hologram in
the air above a keyboard. (Grant Evans)

2004 Ten years out you can almost think of hardware as being free. (Bill Gates)

2004 The future for IT is the same as it was for agriculture and
manufacturing. (Joe Celko)

2004 Off-shoring is just another management fad and we're going to see
it blow over. (Eric Raymond)

2004 A concept called ambient intelligence, where technology is
embedded in our natural surroundings, ever present and available for
access by the individual, will be accomplished within the next 25
years. (Laura Peters)

2003 Unix is dead. [see 1986] (Gus Robertson of Redhat)

2003 By 2014 the web may reach the level of user empowerment defined
by the Macintosh in 1984. (Jakob Nielsen)

2003 By 2007, software systems will be developed and maintained
through collaborative development environments, consisting of
thousands of moving parts that are never turned off. (Grady Booch)

2003 IT doesn't matter. (Nicholas Carr)

2002 There will be a major cyber-terrorism event in 2003. It will be
enough to disrupt the economy for a while, bring the Internet to its
knees for a day or two. (John Gantz)

2002 I do think [in 20 years the global database] will exist, and I
think it is going to be an Oracle database. And we're going to track
everything. (Larry Ellison)

2002 Linux will become the dominant server operating system in the
United States by 2005. (Stacey Quandt)

2001 By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written
directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact
lenses. (Ray Kurzweil)


2001 We will need one million new people to be running these new
e-businesses in the US in the next year alone. (John Gantz)

2001 We've had three major generations of computing: mainframes,
client/server and Internet computing. There will be no new
architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years. (Larry Ellison)

2000 Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and
personal computers will do so by about 2020. (Ray Kurzweil)