Guesstimate of computers in 20 years

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There is a great book that may be a little old now (published in 1997):

What Will Be - How the new world of information will change our lives. By : Michael Dertouzos

In this book he talks about wearing your computer in your shirt pocket with peripherals in your glasses, ear, hands, etc. that will record and display information you need. A handshake will automatically store data like a business card that could be brought up in your glasses/monitor at a later point.

There was also a great program on DiscoveryHD I think that showed the world of the future. People became friends with their AI user interface and received advice/counseling that the computer determine was needed based on monitoring mood via facial expressions, heartrate, tone of voice, etc..

I think computing power will always be an issue and a decent benchmark, but the reality of it is that we will continue to adapt the uses of computers to a point where benchmarks have little meaning. In theory we will have more computing power at our disposal than we can use (read about the singularity) and the real challenge will be creating the applications. Hopefully we will be able to offload programming to AI and all you will have to do is ask your computer, "Each morning present me with a list of things I have to do that day and plot out the most efficient route to complete them, taking into account my personality and past performance of similar tasks." and the next moring your application would be there for you. The possibilities will be endless, well as endless as the human imagination can take us, or maybe as endless as AI can take us.

The future holds a lot of things and it is a very exciting time to be alive. Now we just need to manage to not screw up and blow everyone up before we get that far.
 
One of the guys I work with showed me a section in the Cisco Call Manager book where it can be used to test for stress levels in the voice and undertake action should it detect it. They said that it could be used to monitor telephone technical support staff to see if they are handling customer's calls correctly and perhaps create a record should someone show a tendency towards difficult calls.

I wonder how long it will be before you have a bad day at work and the computer (or router) tells human resources to send a counsellor to your cubicle. "Hey Bob, you okay... everything fine at home?" etc.

But then I wonder if there isn't always something going on underneath... things that we never know about. Do they interrogate the data in these posts looking for trends. Does Google spider it... does the government file it away?
 
Back then, CPU didn't have any heat sink, not even fan, even if they do, all they have is just a small heat sink without fan.

Today, people are using huge HSF, like the Big Typhoon, etc.

So 20 years time, the HSF, or cooling system, might be at a size of your current casing.
 
In 20 years they will have reduced chips in size to the point that pretty much the whole PC and what are extra cards today (GPU, PPU, Soundcard etc) will fit onto the same die about 1/2 the size of current conroe chips.

Now assuming you're willing to pay for the best and the surgery you can have the chip embedded near the cerebral cortex of your brain. They will put some nice mirror/lcd based setup also miniaturized inside your eyes to display right to your retina/optice nerve area when needed.

Due to the increase in efficiency in 20 yrs of these "micro-computers" they will simply tap a few synapses for power needs.

I for one am laying my $ away now as it will likely be costly for the true enthusiast.

On a side-note, thankfully by then graphics will truly be photorealistic so we won't have to go under the knife every 6 months for the newest Nvidia or ATI add-ins :)

Edit: As for heat issues, this will be simply handled by the bodies own circulatory system for reasonable liquid cooling.
 
The overall size of the computer has gone down, so no we will not move towards larger machines. Core 2 Duo has proven that more power does not equal more heat. The trend today seems to be moving towards lower energy comsumption and lower heat, expect this trend to continue. This will lead to smaller computers. The enthusiat crowd will always push the limits of the hardware which will cause them to produce more heat and require larger heatsinks, this appears to be less necessary with the 65nm process chips and we most likely will revert to a day where no fans are required at all.
 
The only thing that could cause that would be if some moron in the middle east attacked someone with a nuke...


Luckly that could never happen.


And oh ya, about a million other ways nature could press the del key.
 
One can find some not-so-shiny statistics too.

Random access time in DRAM:

Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 1984: 250 ns
DDR2, now: around 30 ns
Luckily, we almost never need random access to "random access memory".

Availability of fast enough non-volatile main memory:

1984: zero
Now: zero
Only the chain used to emulate it has become longer: HD - HD cache - RAM - L3 cache - L2 cache - L1 cache - processor. Luckily, this somehow works.
 
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