I frequently see frothy news articles like this one that wax lyrical about how ace life is going to be in the future (presumably when we invent proper VR porn). The one thing these articles all have in common is the wisdom of reknowned futurologist Ray Kurzweil. Now, I'd always assumed that Kurzweil had the best job in the world. Write a couple of books, crop up every now and again and make wildly speculative predictions about times in the future that are so far away that no-one will remember what you said. Sit back, rake in the cash.
But reading through his wikipedia biography reveals that he's actually quite acurate. For instance, his predictions about 2009 (published in 1999) include:
- Solid state memory taking over from hard drives;
- Distributed computing becoming prevelant;
- Cheap laptops for kids.
Of course, he was wrong on some things, but he gets a pretty good hit rate normally.
Now, it seems reasonable to assume that barring a catastrophic BeejTech incident or epic huffquit, this blog will exist in ten years time. So wouldn't it be interesting to see if we can out-Kurzweil Kurzweil and come up with some predictions of our own for the year 2018? Just imagine, we can dig up this blog and gaze at our younger selves' naivity (before returning to our VR environments to have Gail Porter (1997 edition) lick our cyber-balls). To kick us off, here's what Ray himself reckons will come to pass by 2019:
- A $1,000 personal computer has as much raw power as the human brain.
- The summed computational powers of all computers is comparable to the total brainpower of the human race.
- Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).
- Three-dimensional nanotube lattices are the dominant computing substrate.
Have a think about it, and post three (or more, if you're feeling particularly Nostradamian) predictions for what luxuries we'll enjoy in 2018.
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