2025: Faster, Smaller, Less Personal
Advance the calendar 25 years. You’re sitting in your easy chair and your granddaughter climbs on your lap to ask a few questions about the old days.
She looks at the telephone on her wrist that can reach her mother anywhere in the world every time she says “Mom” and asks with incredulity, “Couldn’t you see the person you were talking to?”
The sound of her voice awakens a visual theater fueled by thousands of cameras and microphones surrounding a concert by the Rolling Stones (yes, they’re still around). Instantly, the living room becomes a virtual-reality experience almost as good as the real event. “What,” she asks, “was a television?”
Her father comes in and commands the volume of the Stones concert to drop so he and his colleagues around the world can continue their videoconference.
“You mean you actually went to your office to work, and sometimes you even had to travel to talk with your partners?” the child says.
In the kitchen, the dishwasher is on the blink. But not to worry--the appliance has already consulted with the manufacturer and is busy making the necessary adjustments.
As the girl tugs you out of that chair for a trip to the playground, there are no worries about traffic. The computer in your vehicle will present pictures from cameras suspended over every possible route, instantly showing which would be the fastest.
That’s the world of 2025, as seen by researchers at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J.
Avun Netravali, president of Bell Labs, believes the world of the future will be embraced by a “mega network that will cover the entire planet like a skin.”
“Just as our skin transmits a constant stream of sensory data to our brains,” Netravali said, the global skin will use millions of cameras, sensors, microphones and various measuring devices to collect and transmit data to the network.
Gone will be such things as waiting by the phone, surfing the Net and traveling to business meetings, according to Netravali and his colleagues.
Predicting the future is always hazardous. Current trends surely set the stage for many developments, but what is unknown remains, well, unknown. Who would have thought just a decade ago that the Internet would become so mainstream.
It’s not clear what kind of invention might alter the course in the next few years as dramatically as the Internet has revolutionized the information industry during the last days of the 20th century.
But when Ma Bell speaks, people listen. These are, after all, some of the same people who brought us the transistor and enabled numerous innovations.
Here’s what they are basing their “millennium predictions” on:
* Communications. That long wait for information over the Internet will become a thing of the past, based on current progress in increasing the bandwidth. Bell claims to be doubling the capacity of optical fibers every nine months, and recently announced that it had transmitted data at the rate of 1 trillion bits (a “terabit”) per second. That’s enough to transmit 500,000 movies simultaneously. Bell Labs scientists estimate that within a decade, a single fiber will carry a quadrillion bits per second.
* Miniaturization. Electronic devices are getting so small--a camera on a chip, for example--that it will be possible to put them everywhere. That should permit instantaneous monitoring of everything from pollution to rising flood waters, and will lead to even smaller devices. Bell predicts high-resolution monitors the size of an eyeglass lens, and wireless phones the size of a quarter.
* Software. Programmers are creating software that can take the drudgery out of research by monitoring your work on a personal level, and Bell expects that trend to continue. The personal computer of the future should know you well enough to anticipate your needs, and it will travel with you wherever you go.
All of that could have a downside, of course. Sociologists worry that as we become increasingly dependent on the computer, we will be less likely to interact on a personal level, retreating into our electronic caves like so many hermits. And how many remote cameras do we really need? Every time you have to scratch an itch, will a million people see it? Will technological progress bring an increasing loss of personal privacy?
And the toughest question: Once we get all that information, what will we do with it? Will we be any better prepared to deal with life?
Technology alone won’t solve all of our problems. But it will certainly change the way we deal with most of them.
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Lee Dye can be reached at leedye@ptialaska.net
