MInventor, futurist and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil has a piece in the New York Daily News about how “technology will change humanity by 2020.” These will be familiar to anyone who has read Kurzweil’s essays or books, and more or less follow the roadmap of technology development that was outlined in The Singularity is Near. Among his predictions for routine technology in 2020:
- We will view information via images projected directly on our retinas rather than being forced to look at tiny screens
- Augmented reality will constantly provide us with information on the places, objects and people we look at (see Google Goggles as a mobile phone application that takes baby steps in this direction)
- Solar energy, aided by nanotechnology, will meet most of if not all of the Earth’s power needs
- We will be able to tweak our genes to stay fit and healthy as we get older
- Electric cars will be popular, and most cars will be fitted with accident-avoidance systems; self-driving vehicles will be actively experimented with
I sometimes think about the advances in technology I’ve seen in the past 10 years, or rather, the tech I had access to about a decade ago. My my, how things have changed:
- My cell phone was a candybar Nokia with a tiny black-and-white screen that displayed about 10 lines of text
- No Facebook, no YouTube
- I had to leave the house to rent a movie (no instant streaming available)
- I downloaded music in mp3 format… Only to convert songs to WAV and burn them to CD in order to listen to them on-the-go on my portable CD player
- My 19″ television was about as deep as it was wide, and decidedly low-def
- I used 3.5″ floppy discs to transport digital information
What have been the most dramatic changes in technology that you’ve witnessed in the last ten years?